Decolonial Christianities: Latinx and Latin American Perspectives [1st ed. 2019] 978-3-030-24165-0, 978-3-030-24166-7

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii
Introduction (Raimundo Barreto, Roberto Sirvent)....Pages 1-21
Front Matter ....Pages 23-23
Epistemological Decolonization of Theology (Enrique Dussel)....Pages 25-42
Towards a Decolonial Theology: Perspectives from the Caribbean (Luis N. Rivera-Pagán)....Pages 43-61
Mesoamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality: Decolonizing Religious Belief (Sylvia Marcos)....Pages 63-87
Front Matter ....Pages 89-89
Mapping the Autochthonous Indigenous Church: Toward a Decolonial History of Christianity in las Américas (Jennifer Scheper Hughes)....Pages 91-105
Indigenous Christianities: Ritual, Resilience, and Resistance Among the Nahuas in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Verónica A. Gutiérrez)....Pages 107-127
Iglesia Autóctona: An Indigenous Response to Colonial Christianity (Michel Andraos)....Pages 129-145
Indigenous Decolonial Movements in Abya Yala, Aztlán, and Turtle Island: A Comparison (Néstor Medina)....Pages 147-163
Front Matter ....Pages 165-165
Decolonizing the Cosmo-Polis: Cosmopolitanism as a Rehumanizing Project (Yountae An)....Pages 167-182
Inversion and Diasporas: Decolonizing Racialized Sexuality Transnationally (Matilde Moros)....Pages 183-202
¡Sin maricones no hay revoluciones! (Without Queering, There’s No Revolutioneering!): Mexico’s Queer Subversions of Public Space and the Decolonization of Marriage Heteronormativity (Ángel F. Méndez Montoya)....Pages 203-216
A Critique of the Coloniality of Theological Knowledge: Rereading Latin American Liberation Theology as Thinking Otherwise (Nicolás Panotto)....Pages 217-237
Front Matter ....Pages 239-239
Cuando el pobre crea en el pobre: Decolonial Epistemology in the Ecclesial Base Communities of El Salvador (Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo)....Pages 241-254
Reimagining the Church as a Decolonial Ally: Pedro Casaldáliga’s Liturgies of Repentance (Ann Hidalgo)....Pages 255-266
Front Matter ....Pages 267-267
A Decolonial Prayer (Cláudio Carvalhaes)....Pages 269-287
Back Matter ....Pages 289-301

Citation preview

New Approaches to Religion and Power

DECOLONIAL CHRISTIANITIES Latinx and Latin American Perspectives

Edited by Raimundo Barreto and Roberto Sirvent

New Approaches to Religion and Power Series Editor Joerg Rieger Vanderbilt University Divinity School Nashville, TN, USA

While the relationship of religion and power is a perennial topic, it only continues to grow in importance and scope in our increasingly globalized and diverse world. Religion, on a global scale, has openly joined power struggles, often in support of the powers that be. But at the same time, religion has made major contributions to resistance movements. In this context, current methods in the study of religion and theology have created a deeper awareness of the issue of power: Critical theory, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, and working class studies are contributing to a new quality of study in the field. This series is a place for both studies of particular problems in the relation of religion and power as well as for more general interpretations of this relation. It undergirds the growing recognition that religion can no longer be studied without the study of power. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14754

Raimundo Barreto  •  Roberto Sirvent Editors

Decolonial Christianities Latinx and Latin American Perspectives

Editors Raimundo Barreto Princeton Theological Seminary Princeton, NJ, USA

Roberto Sirvent Hope International University Fullerton, CA, USA

New Approaches to Religion and Power ISBN 978-3-030-24165-0    ISBN 978-3-030-24166-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Jeremy Woodhouse / GettyImages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Raimundo Barreto and Roberto Sirvent Part I Focal Essays  23 2 Epistemological Decolonization of Theology 25 Enrique Dussel 3 Towards a Decolonial Theology: Perspectives from the Caribbean 43 Luis N. Rivera-Pagán 4 Mesoamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality: Decolonizing Religious Belief 63 Sylvia Marcos Part II Indigenous Dreams, Indigenous Resistance  89 5 Mapping the Autochthonous Indigenous Church: Toward a Decolonial History of Christianity in las Américas 91 Jennifer Scheper Hughes

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6 Indigenous Christianities: Ritual, Resilience, and Resistance Among the Nahuas in Sixteenth-Century Mexico107 Verónica A. Gutiérrez 7  Iglesia Autóctona: An Indigenous Response to Colonial Christianity129 Michel Andraos 8 Indigenous Decolonial Movements in Abya Yala, Aztlán, and Turtle Island: A Comparison147 Néstor Medina Part III Decolonial Politics and Theological Possibilities 165 9 Decolonizing the Cosmo-Polis: Cosmopolitanism as a Rehumanizing Project167 An Yountae 10 Inversion and Diasporas: Decolonizing Racialized Sexuality Transnationally183 Matilde Moros 11 ¡Sin maricones no hay revoluciones! (Without Queering, There’s No Revolutioneering!): Mexico’s Queer Subversions of Public Space and the Decolonization of Marriage Heteronormativity203 Ángel F. Méndez Montoya 12 A Critique of the Coloniality of Theological Knowledge: Rereading Latin American Liberation Theology as Thinking Otherwise217 Nicolás Panotto

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Part IV Decolonial Ecclesiologies 239 13 Cuando el pobre crea en el pobre: Decolonial Epistemology in the Ecclesial Base Communities of El Salvador241 Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo 14 Reimagining the Church as a Decolonial Ally: Pedro Casaldáliga’s Liturgies of Repentance255 Ann Hidalgo Part V Conclusion 267 15 A Decolonial Prayer269 Cláudio Carvalhaes Index289

Notes on Contributors

Michel  Andraos, PhD,  is Associate Professor of intercultural theology and ministry, Catholic Theological Union (CTU) at Chicago. A native of Lebanon, Michel’s areas of research, publication and teaching include religion, violence and peace, interreligious dialogue and intercultural theology. The focus of his current research is on reconciliation of the church with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and the developments among the Christian communities of the Middle East in the late modern European colonial period. His most recent publication is The Church and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas: In Between Reconciliation and Decolonization (2019). Raimundo Barreto  teaches world Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary. His most recent publication was the coedited volume World Christianity and Public Religion (2017). One of the conveners of the Princeton World Christianity Conference, he is currently working on his second monograph, Decolonizing Ecumenism: Latin American Contributions to Ecumenical Praxis and Theology, while also coediting the volume Migration and Public Discourse in World Christianity. Cláudio Carvalhaes  is a theologian, liturgist, activist and artist, and the Associate Professor of Worship at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He is author of Eucharist and Globalization, Redrawing the Borders of Eucharistic Hospitality (2013) and What Worship Has To Do With It? Interpreting Life Liturgically (2018), and editor of Only One Is Holy: Liturgy in Postcolonial Lenses (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He is also ix

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the editor of Crosscurrent Journals: Forms of Speech, Religion and Social Resistance (2016) and Black Religions in Brazil with Marcos Silva (2017). Enrique  Dussel teaches philosophy at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa, and at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. He is the author of many books, including Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology and The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of the “Other” and the Myth of Modernity. Verónica A. Gutiérrez  is Associate Professor of Latin American history and Director of Undergraduate Research at Azusa Pacific University. She spent her Fulbright year researching indigenous Christianity in Cholula, Puebla, Mexico, residing in a convento (friary), built on the ruins of a pre-Hispanic teocalli (god-house). She has provided keynotes in the US and Mexico, delivered a TEDx talk about Cholula (“Resilience in the Oldest City in the Americas”), and contributed to San Andrés Cholula: un encuentro del presente con su pasado (2018). The Conference on Faith and History commissioned her to lead a tour of Mexico in 2019 to commemorate the 500 year anniversary of the arrival of Christianity. Ann  Hidalgo  specializes in Latin American theology and feminist and decolonial theory. She has a PhD in religion, ethics, and society from Claremont School of Theology. Her dissertation, “Liberating liturgy: Voices of Latin American theology”, examines liturgies in the liberation theology tradition that empower marginalized communities. Her publications include contributions to Only One Is Holy – Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives, Ecofeminism in Dialogue and Prayers and Rituals from the Ancestors and Beyond: Chicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expression. She is currently the acquisitions librarian at Claremont School of Theology and an adjunct professor. Jennifer  Scheper  Hughes  is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside. A historian of religion, her work gives special attention to the spiritual lives of Mexican and Mexican American Catholics. Her first book is called Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present (2010). She is currently working on a second book project, titled Contagion and the Sacred in Mexico, that explores the religious dimensions of the collapse of the indigenous population in the sixteenth century

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Sylvia  Marcos is founder and a senior researcher of the Seminario Permanente de Antropologia y Genero at the Institute for Anthropological Research (IIA), Universidad Nacional Autonóma de Mexico (UNAM). Marcos has also been a visiting faculty member at Harvard University, visiting professor of Mesoamerican Religions and Gender at Claremont Graduate University, Union Theological Seminary NY, Drew University Theological Seminary, Univeristy of California, Riverside and several other US, Latin American, European and Asian Universities. Marcos is the author of many books and articles, including: Taken from the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions (2006;) the co-edited volume, Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization (2005); Women in Indigenous Religions (2010), Religion y Genero, vol. III of the Iberoamerican Encyclopedia of Religions, (2004) and Indigenous Women and Decolonial Cosmovision (2014). Besides her research and publications she has been actively engaged with the indigenous women’s movements in Mexico and Latin America. Néstor  Medina, PhD,  is a visiting scholar at the Emmanuel College Centre for Religion and its Contexts. He studies the intersection between people’s cultures, histories, ethnoracial relations and forms of knowledge in religious/theological traditions. He was a recipient of the Louisville Book Grant for Minority Scholars (2014) and Research Grant (2018). Among his numerous publications are Mestizaje: (Re)Mapping “Race,” Culture, and Faith in Latina/o Catholicism (2009), which was the winner of the 2012 Hispanic Theological Initiative’s Book Award, On the Doctrine of Discovery (2017) and Christianity, Empire, and the Spirit (2018). Ángel F. Méndez Montoya  holds a BA in dance, an MA in philosophy, MA in theology, and MDiv and a PhD in philosophical theology from the University of Virginia. He wrote his dissertation at Cambridge University (UK) as a scholar in residence. His book The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist was published in 2009. He has published essays in various anthologies and in several international journals. He is currently a fulltime professor and researcher at the Department of Religious Studies at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. He also offers lectures primarily in Mexico, Latin America, US and Europe.

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Matilde Moros, PhD,  is an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University where she teaches social ethics in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. The ethics of resistance and subversion of hegemonic world-views and narratives of power lead her teaching and learning toward a counter-narrative testimonio method of decolonial, transnational feminist ethics. Her research on the communal and historical effects of organized resistance to gendered and sexual violence has led her to an approach to liberation ethics in which recovery of resistance methods has become the primary focus. Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo  is Earley assistant professor of Catholic and Latin American studies at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, NC.  Her first book, The Power and Vulnerability of Love: A Theological Anthropology (2015), draws on women’s experiences of maternity and natality to construct a theology of suffering and redemption that is anchored in the reality of human vulnerability. She is also co-­ editor of Parenting as Spiritual Practice and Source for Theology: Mothering Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Her current research correlates the theology and praxis of El Salvador’s Christian base communities with key insights emerging from decolonial studies. Nicolás  Panotto is an Argentinean theologian, masters in social and political anthropology and PhD in social sciences. He is director of the Multidisciplinary Study Group in Religion and Public Advocacy (GEMRIP) and associate researcher in the Instituto de Estudios Internacionales (INTE), Arturo Prat University. Luis  N.  Rivera-Pagán, PhD,  is the Henry Winters Luce Professor of Ecumenics and Mission Emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the author of several books, among them A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (1992), Entre el oro y la fe: El dilema de América (1995), Mito, exilio y demonios: Literatura y teología en América Latina (1996), Diálogos y polifonías: perspectivas y reseñas (1999), Entre el oro y la fe: El dilema de América (1995), Essays from the Diaspora (2002), Teología y cultura en América Latina (2009), Ensayos teológicos desde el Caribe (2013), Peregrinajes teológicos y literarios (2013) and Essays from the Margins (2014). Roberto  Sirvent is Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, California.

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An  Yountae  is a Korean-American scholar of religion who teaches at California State University, Northridge. His research focuses on the intersection of religion, philosophy, race and coloniality in the Americas. He is the author of The Decolonial Abyss: Mysticism and Cosmopolitics from the Ruin (2016). He is currently coediting a book on race, coloniality and philosophy of religion as well as completing his second monograph, Religion and Decoloniality: The Cartography of Power in the Americas.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Raimundo Barreto and Roberto Sirvent

In her essay, “The Bible and 500 years of Conquest,” Mexican-born biblical scholar Elsa Tamez invites Christians to move beyond trying to construct “liberating hermeneutics” and instead focus on “a critical analysis of our own Christian-biblical discourse.”1 Commenting on the limits of “Western rationality” to respond to the religious practices of Indigenous, African Brazilian, and African Caribbean communities, Tamez asks what it would mean to follow Kuna theologian Aiwan Wagua’s observation that “to think things from outside indigenous thought” is quite problematic. 1  Elsa Tamez, “The Bible and 500 Years of Conquest,” in R.S. Sugirtharajah (ed.) Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World, 25th Anniversary Edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2016), 14; Note on essay (direct quote): “This is a revised version of a lecture presented at one of the plenary sessions at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in 1992 at Philadelphia. It is reprinted from God’s Economy: Biblical Studies from Latin America, ed. Ross Kinsler and Gloria Kinsler (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), pp. 3–17.”

R. Barreto (*) Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] R. Sirvent Hope International University, Fullerton, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_1

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Without naming it, and still using a terminology that did not fully acknowledge the plurality of Latin American Christianities, Tamez’s observation can be taken as a challenge for Latin American Christians to undergo a more radical cultural and epistemological turn, critically reviving their self-­ understanding in the region. The Christian Church might have shown itself to “be sensitive to the poor,” Tamez writes, “but not to the other.”2 Speaking at the time Indigenous peoples in Latin America were commemorating the 500 years of resistance to the European invasion of their land and world, Tamez takes the Christian Church—its practices, its theology, and its hermeneutics—to task for its complicity in the destruction of life, denouncing “that many deaths have been caused, maybe more than the actual liberation of persons and peoples.” Thus the significance of taking a further step in the critical analysis of Christian biblical-theological discourse in Latin America. As Tamez notes, it is no longer possible to “substitute the work of the Indigenous or blacks who are the subjects” of such experiences. Instead, the task of Christian theologizing in the region “is to help the non-Indigenous people to open up their mentality to receive with joy and equality those different practices of faith.”3 Ultimately, Tamez admits, elaborating “a biblical hermeneutics that includes other-non-­ Christian practices…is a task that we will learn from Indigenous exegetes themselves.”4 Tamez’s call for Christianity to confront its centuries-long complicity in colonialism, conquest, and domination at a time when Latin American Christianity was wrestling with the 500th anniversary of its first and tragic encounter with the peoples of Abya Yala was an early call for theologians to start thinking of “decolonial Christianities” even before the establishment of the intellectual movement we now know as the decolonial turn.5 This is to say nothing of the many Indigenous Christian communities 2  Tamez, 22–23. See Aiwan Wagua, “Consecuencias actuales de la invasión europea: Visión indigena,” Concilium, No. 232 (1990): 422–26 (qtd. In Tamez, 22–23). 3  Ibid., 23. 4  Tamez, 23. 5  According to Luciana Ballestrin, the term “decolonial turn” was coined by Nelson Maldonado-Torres in 2005, meaning “the movement of theoretical and practical resistance, political and epistemological, to the logic of modernity / coloniality.” See her “America Latina e o Giro Decolonial,” Revista Brasileira de Ciência Política, n°11. Brasília, maio – agosto de 2013, 89–117. (105). See also Carlos Cunha, Provocações Decoloniais à Teologia Cristã (São Paulo: Terceira Via, 2017), 82ff. For Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ own discussion of the term, see his “La Descolonización y el Giro Des-colonial,” Tabula Rasa. Bogotá – Colombia, No. 9: 61–72m Julio-Deciembre 2008.

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across the globe, including Latin American, that have not only been theorizing decoloniality before and apart from recent scholarship but practicing it as well.6 Indeed, decolonial epistemologies and praxis preceded any academic theorizing of the decolonial turn. Moreover, they continue to take shape in Christian and other communities among people who may have never even heard of the term “decolonial.” So, we might ask, what benefit is there in initiating a direct conversation between lived Christianities and the important scholarship being produced by decolonial thinkers? In other words, what can be gained from making explicit (i.e. theoretical connections between decolonial thought and Christian theology) what is already implicit (i.e. decolonial praxis found in many Latinx, Latin American, and Indigenous communities)? Decolonial Christianities: Latinx and Latin American Perspectives addresses these and other important questions inviting a select group of Latinx and Latin American scholars to a multidirectional conversation, which engages the rich theoretical contributions of the decolonial turn, while relocating Indigenous, Afro-Latin American, Latinx, and other often marginalized practices and hermeneutical perspectives to the center-stage, thus decentering colonial Christianity and theology. While the decolonial turn aims to critique and debunk the West’s “paradigm of discovery and newness,”7 it also proposes new possibilities of knowing and constructing the world which go beyond Western rationality. Decoloniality is at the same time critical and constructive. Whereas it denounces hegemonic 6  We highlight the Indigenous Christian communities here in light of the challenge Latin American Indigenous Christians are faced with when they claim Christianity as their own whereas acknowledging the paradox of the cultural genocide caused by the European Christian invasion of their world. The movement of revitalization of Indigenous and Africanderived religions in the region are also significant expressions of the decolonial turn, even if not using the terminology. Although the coloniality of power, knowing, and being deeply affect Indigenous lives and living, for many of them this revitalization means the reclaiming and reaffirmation of their ways of knowing and knowledge. For an early work highlighting the voices of Mayan Indigenous Christians, their view on the cultural genocide perpetrated in the context of a “Christian invasion of the Maya world,” and the reclaiming of the Mayan spirituality in the context of Indigenous Christian practices, see Guillermo Cook (ed.), Crosscurrents in Indigenous Spirituality, Interface of Maya, Catholic and Protestant Worldviews (Leiden, The Netherlands: E.  J. Brill, 1997). In particular, see the chapter by Vitalino Similox Salazar, “The Invasion of Christianity into the World of the Mayas,” 35–48. 7  Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post-continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique—an Introduction,” Transmodernity, (Fall 2011), 1.

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forms of knowing, it proposes forms of knowing otherwise. It moves from ‘learning to unlearn’ to the utopian constructive proposition that another world is possible.8 In other words, decolonial theory is an option for epistemic disobedience, the delinking from the hegemonic Western foundations of knowledge.9 As Mignolo clarifies, though, such delinking does not mean “abandoning or ignoring what has been institutionalized all over the planet.” Instead, he says, it is meant to shift the geo- and body-politics of knowledge from its foundation in Western imperial history of the past five centuries, to the geo-and body-­ politics of people, languages, religions, political and economic conceptions, subjectivities, etc., that have been racialized (that is, denied their plain humanity).10

In short, going beyond the mere criticism of Eurocentric epistemologies, the decolonial turn proposes an interculturality, which while reassessing, “without denying, the hegemonic epistemology of Western reason upon other peoples and cultures,” moves “towards an intercultural dialogue in which the excluded also participate.”11 With its focus on coloniality12 rather than merely on colonialism, decolonial theory addresses the various configurations of power—the “gradual propagation of capitalism, racism, the modern/gender system, and the naturalization of the death ethics of war”13—that outlived the imperial conquest. In the steps of decolonial thinkers like Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Chela Sandoval, Maria Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, Nelson Maldonado-­ Torres, Walter Mignolo, Gloria Anzaldúa, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and

 See Cunha, op. cit., 64ff.  Walter Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience: the Decolonial Option and the Meaning of Identity in Politics,” Gragoatá, Niterói, N. 22, 11–41, 2007 (13). 10  Ibid. 11  Cunha, op. Cit., 88. 12  Coloniality is a concept originally developed by Peruvian scholar Anibal Quijano, and later expanded by Walter Mignolo, which refers to the systemic legacy of colonialism. According to Mignolo, it “names the underlying logic of the foundation and unfolding of Western civilization from the Renaissance to today of which historical colonialisms have been a constitutive, although downplayed, dimension.” Walter D. Mignolo. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Latin America otherwise: languages, empires, nations) (Duke University Press. Kindle Edition), 2. 13  Maldonado-Torres, op. cit. 8 9

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Enrique Dussel,14 this edited volume hopes to contribute to the “unfinished project” of decoloniality not only through the critique of three of colonialism’s violent legacies: (1) the coloniality of power, (2) the coloniality of knowledge, and (3) the coloniality of being—including the coloniality of faith, and Christian complicity with colonialism and its violent legacies; but also through the proposition of Latin American and Latinx decolonial options in the context of emerging Christianities, which engage “in epistemic disobedience and delinking from the colonial matrix,” promoting “a vision of life and society that requires decolonial subjects, decolonial knowledges, and decolonial institutions.”15 Throughout this volume’s dialogue between decolonial thought and Christian theology and praxis, our contributors address significant questions around the topics of epistemology, modernity, and the production of knowledge. As Nelson Maldonado-Torres writes, The Decolonial Turn is about making visible the invisible and about analyzing the mechanisms that produce such invisibility or distorted visibility in light of a large stock of ideas that must necessarily include the critical reflections of the ‘invisible’ people themselves. Indeed, one must recognize their intellectual production as thinking – not only as culture or ideology.16

14  For a representative sample, see: Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 2004); Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); María Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Hypatia 22. 1 (2007): 186–209; Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5–57; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Walter Mignolo, “Delinking. The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality,” Cultural Studies. Vol. 21. Nos. 2–3 (March/May 2007), pp. 449–514; Walter, Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); Linda T.  Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1999); Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber (New York: Continuum, 1995). 15  Mignolo, op. cit. Kindle version, 9–10. 16  Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies, 21:2, 262.

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Decolonial thought exposes how the academy, the archives, and various apparatuses of state power seek to determine not just what is heard or listened to but what is considered theory to begin with. As Maldonado-Torres explains above, these very mechanisms do not just determine what is theory but who can and cannot produce it. The decolonial turn therefore examines how those in the “underside of modernity” create spaces that serve as sites for producing theory, knowledge, philosophy and, we add, theology. Central to this examination of how certain ideas are made “invisible” by the colonial matrix of power is its intersection with the racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies generated and strengthened by Western modernity. In doing so, decolonial theorists challenge dominant ideologies about reason, agency, and what it means to be human. We situate this volume alongside other important works, hoping to both complement and go beyond the conversations initiated by their contributors. Among them, we highlight three. The first, Mark G. Brett and Jione Havea’s Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theologies: Storyweaving in the Asia-Pacific, examines how “colonial domination damaged native systems of expression” in the lives of Indigenous Australians and Pacific Islanders, outlining creative postcolonial practices that help readers imagine how the church and academy can “shape more constructive intercultural politics and theologies” for the future.17 Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theologies addresses the important question of the central role played by religious and theological language in the colonial process, making critical analysis of religion crucial to decolonizing efforts. Rooted in the Asian-Pacific context, and in conversation with postcolonial rather than decolonial theorists, this volume does not address the Latin American colonial experience. However, regardless of obvious differences of context and approach, we see some equivalence between its contributions and the ones in the present volume, particularly as for the explicit concern for creating innovative spaces for (respectively) postcolonial and decolonial conversations in the academic study of religion and theology. Both books elevate previously overlooked expressions of Christianity and theological voices, offering important contributions to the often-neglected discussion about the relationship between religion (and Christianity, more expressly), postcolonial/decolonial theories, and Indigenous experiences and perspectives in academic discourse. Furthermore, both works advance ­creative 17  Mark G.  Brett and Jione Havea (eds.), Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theologies: Storyweaving in the Asia-Pacific (Palgrave, New York: 2014), ix.

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and innovative interdisciplinary conversations, which while fully acknowledging “the impact of colonialism on indigenous peoples, validate strategies of resistance to ongoing colonial harms, […] also seek to offer constructive thinking, which might move the conversations toward the ideal[s] of [healing and] reconciliation.”18 Another important book we are indebted to is Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy. Engaging in a more direct conversation with decolonial rather than postcolonial thought, in the context of the Americas, it features essays situated, in the editors words, “at the intersection of two axes: liberation epistemology and decolonizing epistemology.”19 Critical of the “epistemic hegemony” that results in the dominant group’s epistemic privilege, the volume’s editors observe that Little or no effort has been made to facilitate and encourage the elaboration of knowledge that does not use the dominant episteme, that is, the dominant system of understanding and the ideas that emerge from the experience of the dominant group. The center continues to hold; it continues to exclude Latina/o epistemology and hermeneutics and therefore, it continues to oppress.20

This work represents the first major step in the Latin American/Latinx context to bring Christian theology into a more explicit conversation with decolonial theory. Taking that task a little further, the third edited volume motivating our project, Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America, provides groundbreaking scholarship on how many Indigenous societies resisted this epistemic and hermeneutic violence by repeatedly “turning around” Christian terms, practices, and traditions during the process of textual translation in colonial Latin America.21 This collection of essays is a major contribution to accessing Indigenous agency and the relocation of the loci of meaning and 18  Raimundo C. Barreto, “Mark G. Brett and Jione Havea (Eds), Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theologies: Storyweaving in the Asia-Pacific. Postcolonialism and Religions Series (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Pp. 273 x. $87.40.” Scottish Journal of Theology 70, no. 3 (2017): 374–76 (376). 19   Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Eduardo Mendieta (eds.), Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 5. 20  Ibid., 3. 21  David Tavárez (ed.), Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America, (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017).

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enunciation in the Latin American experiment with Christianity. The significance of this work’s attention to Indigenous peoples’ interaction with and appropriation and transformation of Christian ideas and practices demonstrates the depth and breadth of the multidirectional impact that took place in the encounter between modern missionary Christianity and the diverse Latin American Indigenous cultures and traditions. Decolonial Christianities stands on the shoulders of these and other previous works,22 offering an important contribution to the field of decolonial thought by drawing on a broader range of ecumenical and theological voices from “the underside of modernity,” while engaging various fields of study, and representing multifaceted loci of enunciation from which words continue to be turned around today in the context of the Latin American and Latinx experiences with Christianity. While Latin American decolonial theorizing can be grouped among other expressions of postcolonial discourse, its geocultural location and the specificity of the Latin American colonial history make its contributions distinct. As Nelson Maldonado-Torres shows, whereas postcolonial thought emerged as a critical discourse engaging postmodern theories, decolonial thinkers, in their efforts to overcome modernity/coloniality, are keener to alternative genealogies emerging in the Southern hemisphere, particularly among Indigenous and Black peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean. In that sense, decolonial writers tend to be particularly attentive to Indigenous and African-derived religious traditions. Their 22  In the past few years, several efforts linking decolonial thought, religious studies, and theology have emerged in the region. Among them, see Teresa Delgado, a Puerto Rican Decolonial Theology: Prophesy Freedom (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Santiago Slabodsky, Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); An Yountae, The Decolonial Abyss: Mysticism and Cosmopolitics from the Ruins (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2017); Paulo Agostinho Nogueira Baptista, “Challenges of Decolonial Epistemologies and the Ecological Paradigm for Religious Studies,” Interações 13/23 (2018): 94–114; and Michel Andraos (ed.). The Church and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas: In Between Reconciliation and Decolonization (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019). Enrique Dussel, himself, as an interand transdisciplinary scholar identified with the rise of both Latin American liberation theology and philosophy, and an acknowledged influence on leading decolonial theorists, is a living example of the unavoidable connection between the study of religion (Christianity, in particular) and decolonial thinking. Discussions on the relationship between liberation theology and decolonial thought have been an ongoing piece of this conversation, as exemplified in the Theology of Liberation and Decolonial Thought Summer School, in Santiago de Compostela on June 3–7, 2019.

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s­uspicion of Christianity and Christian theology cannot be generalized and does not mirror the kind of secularism seen in projects dominantly informed by Eurocentric frameworks. Most decolonial thinkers are not afraid of engaging religion.23 Their work is keenly critical, though, of a certain kind of Christianity, namely, colonial Christianity. Thus decolonial thought contributes, for instance, to dismantle dominant Christian narratives that glorify missionary colonialism,24 exposing the role this kind of Christian discourse and imaginary have played in the formation of coloniality, as legitimizers of colonial violence in the name of evangelization.25 Whereas one cannot speak of an existing antagonism in the relation between decolonial thought and Christian theologizing, one aspires for the promises of further and more systemic explorations of such conversations, which are still far from occupying a more significant place as a meaningful analytical tool and conversational partner in theological seminaries and churches where Christian theology is dominantly produced. In fact, one of us has called for a more intentional initiative on the part of scholars in the field of world Christianity to engage “insights from Latin American decolonial theory,” arguing that such engagement may contribute to a “decolonizing countermovement,” making “room for decolonial forms of Christianity to come to the forefront.”26 This volume contributes to expand this conversation by engaging multiple existing resources present in Indigenous, African-derived, mujerista, queer, and other forms of Latinx and Latin American Christian praxis and theologies, thus offering several examples of Latin American and Latinx Christianities that rise as participants in a broader network of people’s movements and processes critiquing and resisting coloniality and empire. As such, it prioritizes the experiences of those who, existing in the “underside of modernity,” hold particular faith and theological commitments, which have informed 23  See, for example, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Human Rights,” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, dezembro 2017: 117–136; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality.” Posted on Oct. 26, 2016. Frantz Fanon Foundation and website of the Caribbean Studies Association. Retrieved from: http://fondation-frantzfanon.com/outline-of-ten-theses-on-coloniality-and-decoloniality/ 24  A term used by Diego Irrarazaval in “Mission within Cultures and Religions,” Exchange 30, no. 3 (2001): 230. 25  See Raimundo C. Barreto “Beyond Contextualization: Gospel, Culture, and the Rise of a Latin American Christianity,” in World Christianity as Public Religion, edited by Raimundo Barreto, Ronaldo Cavalcante & Wanderley Pereira da Rosa (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017), 97–117. 26  Ibid., 99.

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­ rassroots Christian movements. Such experiences are still often downg played or simply dismissed in certain academic circles—something that in itself denounces a still prevalent Eurocentric bias in both ecclesiastical institutions and important sectors of the academy. Our primary aim, then, is to critically evaluate both the ways in which Christianity is complicit in empire and coloniality and also the instances in which it provides unique and important resources for resisting, un-thinking, un-disciplining, and re-­imagining alternative ways of being in the world. While it might be helpful to frame Decolonial Christianities in terms of advancing an ongoing exploration of the points of connection and difference between Latinx and Latin American theologies and decolonial theories, we consider the scope of this volume to go beyond theological discourse. By this we mean that our contributors devote just as much attention exploring the links between the decolonial turn and historical, ethical, and hermeneutical issues in Latin American Christian discourses. This is another reason for highlighting the significance of the book Colonial Contexts, which also explores the context and reality in which postcolonial theologies are produced. Moreover, the broader regional conversation that the book proposed in the Asia-Pacific offers a model for us to foment a more comprehensive understanding of the decolonial turn and its implication for theology, Christian praxis, and Latinx/Latin American Christian scholarship, prioritizing existing alternative genealogies (Indigenous, Black, women, among others). While deeply indebted to Decolonizing Epistemologies, we expand the conversation by including alternative voices from a variety of contexts, from Argentina to Puerto Rico, to Canada, representing different Christian traditions and perspectives. Finally, this edited volume pays special attention to ethnic/racial discourses key to the epistemological rupture proposed by decolonial theorists. Acknowledging that sometimes artificial geographical borders—particularly between those living in the belly of the Empire, and those living outside its claimed territory—become a symbol of further separation, and that often the conversations among Latin American scholars writing predominantly in Spanish and Portuguese and that of those writing in the Anglophonic academy fail to engage one another more consistently, this book aims to bring Latinx and Latin American perspectives into a common project by transgressing several borders which artificially but historically have divided us, as well as silenced and oppressed many. Indeed, the distance created by—and the relatively small collaboration between—

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those working on the Northern side of the Mexican/US border and those working on the Southern side of it is quite problematic. In contrast to this tendency, adopting a decolonial border thinking perspective,27 this work attempts to bridge that gap by encouraging a critically constructive conversation which highlights a variety of decolonial Christian experiences in the continent. It is worth noting that the volume title refers to Christianities instead of Christianity. Considering that Christianity is always cultured, and in contrast to the hegemonic trends of the modern/colonial Eurocentric project, we avoid abstract references to Christianity, favoring embodied religious practices, which emerge in concrete contexts and communities. By naming decolonial Christian practices, the volume contributes to also name colonial ones, making room for the condemnation of colonial Christian theologies and practices while avoiding the generalized rejection of Christianity. In other words, this project addresses the question about how Christianity can still be possible—and meaningful—after colonialism and empire. How can Latinxs and Latin Americans still be Christians in light of coloniality and empire? Although traditional divisions of historical periods in Latin American history would identify the colonial era as ending at a certain moment, colonialism’s legacy persists, taking new forms. As many of our contributors point out, while political and economic relations must not be ignored, they cannot be disentangled from other forms of domination, involving language, culture, religion, and the production of knowledge. Christian institutions and theology have undeniably been part of that mix. In spite of that, considering that the large majority of Christians in the continent are poor and marginalized, finding themselves often at the receiving end of systemic oppression, many have encountered in their faith resources and tools for the transformation of their lives, communities, and living conditions, turning Christian stories, teachings, and symbols into inspiration and tools in their struggle for liberation, and re-signifying them in the light of Indigenous, African-derived, and popular histories and legacies. Eleven contributors were asked to respond to three “Focal Essays.” The first one, Enrique Dussel’s “Epistemological Decolonization of Theology,” the opening chapter in this book, discusses the theoretical 27  For the connection between decoloniality and border thinking, see Walter D. Mignolo, “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: On (De)coloniality, Border Thinking, and Epistemic Disobedience,” Confero, vol. 1, n. 1, 2013, 129–150.

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rupture originated with the epistemological turn in the realm of the sciences produced by Latin American and Latinx theories of decolonization, and its impact on theology. Dussel, one of the first Latin American scholars to pay attention to what would later be named coloniality, expands on the tradition of liberation theology in his effort to identify modernity’s structural sin. He discusses two inversions of the early messianic Christianity that emerged with the Jesus movement—the first one starting in the fourth century, and the second one at the end of the fifteenth century— which shaped the colonial Christianity that is at the root of the modern/ colonial paradigm that has created the Eurocentric world system along with the subsequent destructive disparities of our time. In response to that, he proposes an inversion of these inversions as a way for decolonizing theology. Christendom resulted from the transformation of both the Greco-Roman culture and the early Christian culture. The apex of Dussel’s first inversion happened with the crowning of the emperor of the newly formed Holy Roman Germanic empire by the Pope, a scene that would seem absurd to the early messianic Christians. The second inversion takes place with the expansion of Christendom from a regional system to a world system, central to an incipient global geopolitics, having lasting implications to Latin America and other regions dubbed peripheral by the self-proclaimed center of a new world system. According to Dussel, this inversion marks a radical change in geopolitics that would relocate Europe (particularly Latino Europe) from its peripheral status to the center of global commerce and politics. If the first inversion was from Messianic Christianity to Christendom, the second one turned that Christendom into an imperial Christendom, now set to dominate “oppressed colonies in the name of gospel of the Crucified one.” The Epistemological decolonization of Christianity requires the relocation of theological thinking moving its epicenter from imperial Christendom to the oppressed colonial subjectivity. While the insights of world Christianity scholars such as Lamin Sanneh28 focus simply on the translatability of the Gospel, Dussel contrasts the creative transformation of Messianic Christianity in the first centuries incorporating elements of Greco-Roman cultures and creating a new culture to the contempt for the Indigenous cultures of the oppressed colonial subjects, forced to turn their back on their culture in the name of the universalization of Christendom. 28  Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. Revised and Expanded (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009).

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Dussel’s insights put the cultural transformations identified by world Christianity scholars, particularly in the formerly colonized world, in perspective, as he places the subjectivity and revitalization of Indigenous culture at the center of such transformations, as well as of emerging demands to rethink the utopia of modernity which has led to the oppression of the peoples of the colonial South. Moreover, Dussel’s critique of modernity, like that of other Latin American decolonial thinkers, is external. In contrast to internal or Eurocentric critiques, it denounces its racist elements that permeate the subjectivity of Eurocentric thinkers and the claimed objectivity of their theories, relocating the loci of enunciation to the self-conscious postcolonial subject. Epistemic decolonization is important not only because it unmasks the racism hidden in the universalistic claims made by Eurocentric epistemologies, along with the distortion it causes, but also because it brings to the fore other knowledges and ways of knowing hitherto made invisible. Dussel identifies the Latino-Germanic Christendom as the spine of Eurocentrism. Therefore, the decolonization of Christian theology is central for the task of decolonization. By opening this book with his chapter, the editors acknowledge the centrality of Enrique Dussel’s work in the roots of decolonial thinking. Through his prolific work, Dussel paved the way for the rise of Latin American decolonial theory. But more needs to be said about him. On top of being a philosopher—the founder of a Latin American philosophical school called liberation philosophy—and a renowned historian—a pioneer of a Latin American historiography that paved the way for non-­Eurocentric narratives of the birth and development of a Latin American Christianity— Dussel’s work has undeniably had a major impact on the formation of Latin American liberation theology. Dussel was one of the key founders of CEHILA (Comisión para el Estudio de la Historia de las Iglesias en América Latina y el Caribe) in 1973 and an active member of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT), an organization that “can be credited with enabling much of the theological exchange and cross-fertilization among Asian, African, and Latin American theologies in the past 40 years.”29 His work has been influential in the 29   For more on Dussel’s association with CEHILA and EATWOT, see Raimundo C.  Barreto, “The Epistemological Turn in World Christianity: Engaging Decoloniality in Latin American and Caribbean Christian Discourses,” in Journal of World Christianity 9/1 (2019): 48–60.

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formation of theologians in Latin America and beyond for more than four decades. Yet, his contribution, particularly to the theoretical development associated with decolonial thinking, had not yet addressed specifically the significance of decolonizing Christianity and Christian theology. With this chapter, Dussel comes full circle as one of the most influential Latin American intellectuals of the last quarter of the twentieth century; someone who not only opened the doors for new ways of knowing and thinking, but who continues to point the way forward. The second heading chapter, written by Princeton Emeritus Professor of History and Ecumenics Luis N.  Rivera-Pagán, offers a historical-­ theological perspective on the background of the decolonial quest, speaking from the perspective of the Caribbean—Puerto Rican, more specifically—experience. In the case of the Caribbean—as it also happened elsewhere in Latin America—Christendom was at the center of the colonial discourse, since the conquest was pitched from its inception as being beneficial to the Christian cause. He highlights that on top of political subjugation and material appropriation, ideological justification is key for imperial dominion. In his words, “colonial discourse mystifies imperial dominion,” thus highlighting the importance of epistemic decolonization. Such demand helps us understand the centrality of theological discourses and biblical interpretation in the production of colonial hegemony. Consequently, Rivera-Pagán’s appeal to a rereading of the Christian Scripture from the perspective of those who were made subaltern in order to produce a liberating discourse that defies colonial hegemony becomes so important. In the particular case of Puerto Rico, Rivera-Pagán’s own locus of enunciation, there is a double consciousness that stems from the dual colonial experience, first in the hands of Spain, and since 1898, in the hands of the United States—what has given Puerto Rico the epithet of “a postcolonial colony.” Coloniality in the Puerto Rican case, then, cannot be disassociated from the experiences of migration, diaspora, and exile, which Rivera-Pagán describes so vividly, reminding his readers that more than half of the Puerto Rican population live in the United States, and the Puerto Ricans’ awkward situation of being US citizens, although of a different category, which make them subaltern subjects. From that distinctive place of enunciation, Rivera-Pagán finds in the experience of migration and diaspora a commonality that marks most colonial peoples all over the world, highlighting the importance of these concepts to postcolonial studies in general, since diaspora not only entails dislocation and displacement

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“but also a painful and complex process of forging new strategies to articulate cultural differences and identifications.” On top of seeing in the diaspora a critical location for the production of postcolonial defiance, Rivera-Pagán brings attention to the diasporic ecumenicity, which impacts most urban centers in the world today. In other words, in the counter “invasion” of what he calls colonized barbarians, people who have heretofore been silenced are now reshaping and reconfiguring their own narratives, which in light of the proximity of other colonized and colonial narratives hybridize the language of the colonizers, producing new crossroads and dialectical encounters. This is the ecumenical dimension of migration and diaspora. Rivera-Pagán, among other things, enriches the conversation by bringing theological and diasporic voices to bear on postcolonial and cultural studies, where they have still been largely neglected. The third text the contributors to this volume are asked to engage with is Sylvia Marcos’ “Mesoamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality: Decolonizing Religious Belief,” originally published in 2009, in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. Marcos’ contribution comes from another important perspective in decolonial studies, that of Indigenous women, with special attention to their spirituality. Marcos, an anthropologist who has studied feminist Indigenous movements particularly in Central America and Mexico, brings to the fore the agency of Indigenous women and their work producing an Indigenous spirituality which is in itself a decolonial turn. Such agency is double-edged, since, as she ably demonstrates in her chapter, they want both to preserve and transform their Indigenous culture. In this sense, she can speak of a modern Indigenous culture. At the heart of such a process is spirituality, which they consider “the main axis of culture.” Despite the significance of these three head chapters, the core of the book is composed of 11 chapters by younger scholars from different parts of Latin America and the Latinx diaspora in the United States and Canada who critically and creatively engage the three head chapters, offering important contributions for the development of decolonial Christian approaches, which are inter- and transdisciplinary, blurring the strictness of disciplinary academic discourse, while interweaving different fields and disciplines, thus contributing to fresh insights in Christian theology and history, tuned to the praxis and faith of marginalized and often silenced peoples. To help the reader navigate these responses, 10 of the 11 chapters that follow are divided into three sections. Part II of the book, called “Indigenous Dreams, Indigenous Resistance,” is made up of the four

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responses that engage the three focus essays in light of the experience of the Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Part III, “Decolonial Politics and Theological Possibilities,” gathers the next four responses, which present critiques, inversions, and subversions of coloniality and hegemonic theological knowledge, re-imagining theology as “thinking otherwise.” Part IV, “Decolonial Ecclesiologies,” is formed by two chapters that continue this exercise of theological re-imagination, now with a focus on re-imagining the church and its liturgies. In her chapter, “Mapping the Autochthonous Indigenous Church: Toward a Decolonial History of Christianity in las Américas,” Jennifer Scheper Hughes reads Indigenous maps in the sixteenth century (Mexico) to identify and draw out the counter narratives that they yield regarding histories of Christianity—narratives that contradict the idea of “spiritual conquest” and place Indigenous communities and Indigenous agencies at the center of Latin American Christian origin. “It is not possible to disengage, to sever, or uncouple the history of Latin American Christianity from the global imperial project, or from colonial violence,” she warns, “But neither can we juxtapose Christianity and indigeneity.” Arguing that Christianity’s survival in Latin America can only be partly understood as the product of colonialism and imperialism, Jennifer Scheper Hughes shows that its proliferation was due to various Indigenous communities deciding that Christianity not only would survive, but should survive. “In as much as Christianity was imposed upon the continent by force and coercion,” she concludes, “the adopted religion was also compelled to yield to indigenous preferences and ideas about the sacred.” Verónica A. Gutiérrez similarly “challenges the dominant Eurocentric narrative about passive or fatalistic native peoples” in her chapter, “Indigenous Christianities: Faith, Resilience, and Resistance Among the Nahuas in Sixteenth-Century Mexico.” By focusing on the Nahuas in sixteenth-century central Mexico, Gutiérrez shows that, far from being mere passive recipients of a colonizing religion, native peoples played a critical role in developing Indigenous forms of Christian faith and practice. She reminds readers that since the 1970s scholars have theorized about “reciprocal models of evangelizations,” namely, in the context of Gutiérrez’s study, “a Nahuatilization of Christianity, rather than the static imposition of a foreign belief system.” Thus, whether by pursuing various artistic ventures, planning extravagant celebrations, or embracing alternative methods of church leadership and theological pedagogy, native peoples displayed incredible resilience and resistance to the colonial enterprise. “Christianity in Latin America was not a static imposition of Mediterranean

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Catholicism,” Gutiérrez shows, “but rather a collaborative enterprise resulting in a variety of indigenous Christianities.” In “Iglesia Autóctona: An Indigenous Response to Colonial Christianity,” Michel Andraos examines how Indigenous communities in San Cristóbal de Las Casas engage in social, political, and ecclesial resistance to churches that reproduce coloniality in their ecclesial structures and theologies. The story of the iglesia autóctona, Andraos writes, “is ultimately the story of the struggle of the Indigenous people in the church to transform the colonial ecclesial structures that have often justified and actively contributed to their dispossession, cultural genocide, and subjugation.” Claiming that “churches remain ignorant of the deep implications of their historical and continued role in the ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples,” Andraos insists on the importance of studying—and joining—movements such as those of the iglesias autóctonas. Not only do they “represent today a deep hope and force for decolonization and transformation of ” our ecclesial communities, structures, and theologies, Andraos concludes, but they also open up decolonial spaces within the Church that help us imagine alternatives to the violent structures that have so often served “as the main instrument[s] and force[s] of their colonization, and where coloniality is still pervasive today.” Néstor Medina, in his chapter, “Indigenous Decolonial Movements in Abya Yala and Aztlán, Turtle Island: A Comparison,” draws on reports from various reconciliation commissions and historical memory projects to show how the Mayan communities in Guatemala and the First Nations, Métis and Inuit, in Canada embody what Medina calls “decolonial epistemological impetuses.” In doing so, Medina invites readers to locate the decolonizing aspects already present in Latina/o theology. “For Latina/o theologians, the goal has not been the creation of a grand-theoretical frame,” he writes, “but the careful articulation of the particular ways in which our communities live their faith in God.” Ultimately, Medina asks what it would be like for Latina/o theology to direct its efforts toward embracing, enhancing, and developing more of these already existing decolonizing methodologies. In his chapter, “Decolonizing the Cosmo-Polis: Cosmopolitanism as a Re-humanizing Project,” An Yountae takes a critical look at modern cosmopolitanism and the role played by imperial Christianity and neocolonialism in constructing a universal (and problematic) conception of the human. But although cosmopolitanism finds itself “deeply entangled” with liberal notions of property, progress, and freedom, An urges readers not to dismiss cosmopolitanism altogether. Rather, by following Frantz

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Fanon, we can begin to imagine cosmopolitanism in a decolonial way, “as a rehumanizing project against the European ideal of universal humanity which is sustained only at the expense of dehumanization of others.” According to An, then, the process of “rethinking cosmopolitanism” involves recognizing how Christianity has violently colluded with imperial and neocolonial agendas. Yet at its best, An adds, Christianity offers plenty of inspiration to decolonial movements, particularly in the form of ­eschatological visions—visions pointing not just to the end of empire but to the end of the colonial order as well. Matilde Moros draws on the work of Marcella Althaus-Reid and Peter Wade to examine the “decolonial” roots—and possibilities—of Indecent Theology. In her chapter, “Inversion and Diasporas: Decolonizing Racialized Sexuality Transnationally,” Moros describes both Wade’s and Althaus-Reid’s contributions to liberationist understandings of sexuality and religion. In Wade’s account, Moros explains, “The theological conversation in Latin America…had sexuality in it from its inception, but it was a regulatory conversation, a directive conversation from the top down, from church authorities to both colonized and colonizers.” In contrast, Moros claims, “Althaus-Reid begins a conversation about indecent theology by observing that the indigenous women have ‘lost their narrative,’” and that, as a result, there remains crucial analytical gaps in regards to which groups constitute the poor, marginalized, and colonized. While admitting that Althaus-Reid failed to pay sufficient attention to the role “race played in the sexual histories of Latin America,” Moros nonetheless sees the promise of Althaus-Reid’s “indecent proposal,” one that creates “a genealogy of sexual histories” that “becomes a truly theological proposal for resistance,” as “a decolonial diasporic organizing of multiplicities and multiplications of peoples.” In his chapter, “¡Sin maricones no hay revoluciones! (Without queering, there’s no revolutioneering!): Mexico’s Queer Subversions of Public Space and the Decolonization of Marriage Heteronormativity,” Ángel F. Méndez Montoya theorizes “a queer political theology of public space” in the context of same-sex marriage debates in Mexico. In the process, he proposes “a postsecular theological perspective in which religion is not excluded from public space, but rather collaborates and supports the construction of a public space that twists, criticizes and opposes all practices of discrimination as well as violence against sexual diversity.” Méndez Montoya critiques any rhetoric of merely tolerating sexual diversity, arguing that a faithful imitation of God’s inclusive love calls us to respect and even love

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sexual diversity. Importantly, Méndez Montoya urges readers to advocate for justice and liberation beyond any same-sex marriage victory. “While same sex marriage is an important step in Mexico,” he writes, “it must continue developing collaborative strategies that protect most vulnerable minorities living at the peripheries of society: such as people of color, indigenous, and disenfranchised individuals and communities. For sure, a true revolution is not just about equality and inclusion; it is as well about finding creative ways of emerging empowerment from many gender and sexually diverse people around the world.” In the chapter, “A Critique of the Coloniality of Theological Knowledge: Rereading Latin American Liberation Theology as Thinking Otherwise,” Nicolás Panotto argues that theorists of the decolonial turn can help Latin American theologians address what he views as serious methodological limitations. By this, Panotto means that Latin American Liberation Theologies need to “have greater sensitivity about the complexities, daily lives, passions and feelings that are at stake when it comes to discerning the action of God, the processes of history, and the ways in which subjects are constituted and act.” In order to accomplish this, he argues, it is imperative that theologians highlight the “theopoetic” in order to create space for “otherwise-epistemes” to emerge. This decolonial method, Panotto concludes, “doesn’t start from an Absolute Liberating Entity, but from a position that liberates that same notion of the divine towards a Mystery that breaks through established representations, tightening the borders of hegemonic meaning and promoting decolonial senses from the notions of difference and diversity.” Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo, in her chapter, “Cuando el pobre crea en el pobre: Decolonial Epistemology in the Ecclesial Base Communities of El Salvador,” draws on the experiences of Salvadoran comunidades eclesiales de base (CEBs) to help theorize what a decolonial epistemology might look like in various theological contexts. Pointing to the base communities’ insistence that the marginalized and forgotten people “are the ones who hold the key to their epistemological and practical liberation,” Gandolfo shows how the communities’ pastoral and prophetic dimensions facilitate a space where CEBs do not just produce culture or ideology but are “primary producers of knowledge and subjects of history.” In short, Gandolfo asserts that Salvadoran CEBs have been decolonizing epistemology, liturgy, and praxis without ever having labeled themselves as “decolonial.” Their example, she concludes, calls on theologians to remember—and even embrace—the always-unfinished process of decolonizing epistemology, a “process that must always be critically engaged and examined lest

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we think we have arrived at our destination when we are really only resting by the wayside.” Ann Hidalgo, in her chapter, “Reimagining the Church as a Decolonial Ally: Pedro Casaldáliga’s Liturgies of Repentance,” examines how two liturgical practices of Brazilian Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga in the 1970s and 1980s models a promising, albeit imperfect, attempt to make amends for colonial violence against the Afro-Brazilian community and Indigenous peoples of Brazil. By engaging in these “liturgies of repentance,” Hidalgo shows, the Roman Catholic Church opens itself up to many transformational possibilities—possibilities that are transformational only when its mission is centered on penitence and repair. Among these possibilities, Hidalgo concludes, is the Church presenting itself as a “decolonial ally.” “By honoring its own moral commitments,” Hidalgo writes, “the Church can take steps toward healing relationships with indigenous peoples and people of African descent, with women, with victims of sexual abuse by clergy, with members of the LGBTQ community, with members of other faith traditions, and with other groups that it has marginalized.” Cláudio Carvalhaes closes the book by offering a “A Decolonial Prayer” that addresses questions around doubt, despair, pedagogy, and our ongoing complicity in colonialism and coloniality. At certain points, Carvalhaes asks if he knows how to pray anymore, how to teach anymore, and how even his reading and liturgical practices might be implicated in violence. “How do I go after the ‘coloniality of power’ as proposed by Anibal Quijano through the intricacies of many grammars of faith and forms of living O God?” Carvalhaes pleas. “How Christian religious formation through songs, prayers, sermons, worship spaces and stories,” he continues, “hold on to cosmologies and forms of living that can both liberate and oppress people? I wonder about how my senses filled with coloniality prevent me from fully saying your name.” By revisiting various themes from other chapters in our volume, Carvalhaes wonders what—and even if—penitence and repair are possible for a Church so historically wedded to state and market violence. And if so, do we even have the vocabulary, let alone the imagination, to dream of, pray for, and build new worlds? These several chapters offer a variety of perspectives on conversations on decoloniality and Christian praxis and theology that have implications to a number of fields and areas—history, philosophy, theology (per se), ecclesiology, bible, liturgy, and philosophy. Furthermore, the contributions in this book are also relevant to the burgeoning field of world Christianity, contributing to a dialogue that can help close the gap between this emerging field and ongoing Latin American studies.

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In short, the vast combination of voices, themes, disciplines, fields of study, and interests present in this book, along with its interdisciplinary, intercultural, and inter-contextual makeup, and the fresh and creative lines of inquiry it offers, makes this volume of unique value to students, scholars, and religious leaders seeking to understand the epistemological turn in the study of Latinx and Latin American Christianity, whose backdrop is “the revitalization of indigenous communities and religions in Latin America, and their contribution to a fresh view of interculturality as a language for a life betwixt and between in the region.”30 A book project of this magnitude involves the cooperation of more people than we can name. We must express our special gratitude, though, to all contributors to this volume, for the time and dedication to produce a work of the most excellent quality. We are especially grateful to Enrique Dussel, Sylvia Marcos, and Luis N. Rivera-Pagán for living a life of committed scholarship that has helped shape intellectual and practical initiatives throughout the Americas and beyond. Their contributions have become the axis around which this volume is structured. All the other contributors named above are already leading or rising scholars whose intellectual work and moral courage are important examples of the struggle to decolonize the academy itself. Among them, we must acknowledge Néstor Medina’s generosity, as he walked the extra mile of translating Enrique Dussel’s chapter from the Spanish. We are equally grateful to Melissa Martin, who, serving as editorial assistant for Raimundo Barreto at Princeton Theological Seminary during the production of this volume, helped with some of its initial editing stages. Finally, we are thankful to the work of our editors at Palgrave, for their understanding of the relevance of a multilingual and intercultural project like this, which addresses ongoing transformations in the cultural and intellectual makeup of Christianity in the Americas. Special thanks to the competent work of Palgrave Macmillan’s Assistant Editor of Philosophy and Religion Amy Invernizzi for her continuous presence and support throughout the development of this project. We deliver this work of many months to our readers in the hope that it will enrich the understanding of a complex reality, which exists in between a colonial wound that never stops hurting and the blossoming of creative and alternative narratives and forms of knowing that open promising windows into new possible futures. 30  See Raimundo C. Barreto, “The Epistemological Turn in World Christianity: Engaging Decoloniality in Latin American and Caribbean Christian Discourses,” Journal of World Christianity 9/1 (2019): 48–60.

PART I

Focal Essays

CHAPTER 2

Epistemological Decolonization of Theology Enrique Dussel

The theme of “epistemological decolonization” originated from a group of Latin American and Latino/a (these last in the United States of America) philosophers, sociologists, historians, and other social scientists. It is an elaboration of a problematic that began because of critical positions such as postcolonialism (in cultural studies), subaltern studies (among Indian historians), and postmodernism (mainly in Europe and the United States of America). It is also a further development of those who articulated the theory of dependence (during the decade of the 1960s), the critique to centralized capitalism (in relation to its periphery), theology of liberation, the theme of race and gender (from the feminist movements), as well as from the originary peoples (as in the case of the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas, etc.). It is structured around what has been called “coloniality of power” (which Translated by Néstor Medina An earlier version of this chapter appears in Concilium 2013/2, Postcolonial Theology, edited by Hille Haker et al., 24–34. E. Dussel (*) Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa, Mexico City, Mexico Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_2

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was proposed by Anibal Quijano, a Peruvian sociologist)1 and “transmodernity”2 (that stemmed from the horizon of liberation theology that a number of us Latin American and Latino/a philosophers practice).3 From this complex thematic structure emerges the “epistemological decolonization”, which finds roots in the thought of José Carlos Mariátegui (Peruvian), Frantz Fanon (from Martinique), and Immanuel Wallerstein (with his theory of the World-System). In this chapter, I wish to describe within theology this new theoretical rupture in the horizon of the sciences (therefore epistemological). I follow the tradition of the theology of liberation without repeating what has already been said, but taking a new step forward as the theology of liberation of the 1960s did not have an explicit clarity on the matter.

Messianic Christianity To speak of messianic Christianity is a tautology: it is to repeat twice the same thing. “Christianity” comes from “Christ”, which in Greek means messiah (khristós) and his followers are messianic (khristianoí). In fact, the early messianic community4 was a proselytizing Jewish sect open to the goim (Hebrew: the non-Jewish); from this experience of “openness”, in Barnabas and Paulo of Tarso, it expanded rapidly among the poor, the oppressed, the slaves, and other majority groups in the Helenic-Roman Empire. The other Jewish sect was structured around the Law in the synagogues, since the diaspora was inaugurated by the Babylonian exile, proselytized less, and was able to preserve its customs without incorporating the goim. They were merchants for life, dedicated to commerce in the interstices of the reigning empires (Babylonian, Hellenic, Roman, Byzantine, the Muslim Caliphates, Persia, Medieval feudal ­Latino-­Germanic, Russian Czarists, up to modern Europe, and the United States of America in the present). Because of the 1  See A.  Quijano. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Social Classification”, in M.  Boraña, E.  Dussel and C.  A. Járegui (Eds.). Coloniality at Large (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp.  181–223; “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality”, in W. Mignolo and E.  Escobar (Eds.). Globalization and the De-colonial Option (London: Routledge, 2010), 22–32. 2   See the electronic publication www.Transmodernity.com (especially Linda Alcoff’s contribution). 3  See E. Dussel, E. Mendieta & C. Bohórquez. El Pensamiento Filosófico Latinoamericano, del Caribe y Latino (1300–2000), (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 2010). 4  In other words, “Christianity”.

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persecution by Emperor Titus, the Judaism of the temple or priestly disappeared forever. The messianic sect constituted by the (Christian) church from its inception opposed the Hellenic-Roman Empire, denying it the pretention to be called empire, the necessary mediation with the sacred and the divine. The emperor, “Son of God” and “Supreme Pontiff” (bridge between human beings and the gods), was deprived of such dignity by the (Christian) messianic church. In this way, the messianic secularized the Roman Empire; at least arrogated to themselves the union or mediation of God with history,5 a presence that springs from the poorest and humiliated, and critically confronted the Empire, desacralizing and secularizing it. The messianic church (read “Christian”) became the majority of the population in certain regions, above all in the east of the Empire, in today’s Turkey, for example. In his internal strife to defeat all of the competing Caesars after the death of Dioclesian, Constantine negotiated with the messianic and proposed them freedom of worship, asking in exchange that they did not oppose the Empire, thus supporting his candidacy. This was how the son of Saint Elena became the Emperor. The messianics (read “Christians”) went from being persecuted to being accepted, tolerated, and soon after became the hegemony of the empire.

Christendom At the turn of the fourth century, imperceptibly and slowly, without many taking consciousness of what happened, the inversion from messianism into triumphant Christianity was produced. The messianics (in a similar sense as given by Walter Benjamin and Emmanuel Levinas) ceased to be critical of the empire and became its supporters, its members, and, in time, its defenders. The Messiah crucified by the soldiers of the Roman Empire was now acclaimed as the Christ: the Christ who had lost Isaiah’s image of “suffering servant” in order to be Pantokrator: the all-powerful [God] of the Byzantine basilicas. Christ is now the name of the God who founded the Empire, in whose name the Roman armies confront slaves, the Germanics, the barbarians, the rebellious farmers, and the slaves that ­pretend to be free. It is the “God of the armies” to whom Joshua claimed to clean up the “promised land” of the Canaanites and the one that pushed 5  See the book by G. Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria. Per una Genealogía Teológica dell’e\ Economía e del Governo (Vicenza: Editizione Neri Pozza, 2007).

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the destruction of Jericho. It is now a God of the oppressors: it is an idol. The God of Israel had been transformed into Baal, into Moloch. Søren Kierkegaard and Marx critiqued the God of Hegel because it was the God of Christendom. Christendom (Cristiandad, Christlichkeit, Chretienté) is not the same as messianic Christianity (cristianismo, Christendum, Christianisme)6; it is its inversion, the first inversion. From the fourth century to the beginning of the seventeenth century, Christendom fetishistically replaced the philosophical and theological foundations of the Hellenistic-Roman Empire. The ancient pagan temples were destroyed, the royal market places were transformed into temples (basilicas), the philosophical school at Athens was closed, and Christendom became the new hegemonic culture. I say culture and not only religion. If it would have been only religion, it would have survived the Greco-Roman culture. But it was not like that. A complex hybrid Greco-Roman and Semite-Christian culture was produced. The earlier messianism turned into the religion that structurally gave birth to the new culture, which was the fruit of the transformation of the ancient Greco-Roman and Christian culture. For example, in the Mediterranean and adjacent towns existed the celebration of the “birth of the sun” on the shortest day of the year, December 21. Irish people near Dublin still have an ancestral Neolithic temple that has a tunnel through which the sunlight goes only one day a year, illuminating a polished stone at the very end of the tunnel. That day is December 21. The messianics incorporated that pagan ritual because of the increasing numbers of proselytes in their communities celebrating the “birthday of the sun of justice”: Jesus (Christmas day). It is a celebration that did not exist in the messianic community (of suspect fetishistic inspiration, founded on the astronomic year). As time went by, it became a central moment of the liturgical year of Christendom; from the year 1000 A.C. Germanic elements were added (as was the case with the Christmas tree). Many elements of the Greco-Roman culture and religious rites were subsumed by the cult of Christendom. The Greco-Roman culture had been evangelized; its symbols, cults, rituals had been adopted and transformed as com6  See Karl Loewith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche, II, V: Das Problem der Christlichkeit, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, a Nietzsche, cap. V (Stuttgart, 1964), 350  ff. It is impossible to understand the critique of religion in S.  Kierkegaard and K.  Marx without regard to this inversion of Christianity. Both writers put things in their place, even from the point of Messianic (authentic) Christianity.

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ponents of the new culture. This culture continued to move up toward the Germanic north, crossing the Rhine and the Danube and into the strange lands of the Latin Empire. With the Holy Roman Germanic Empire near Trier, and with the papal crowning of the French Charlemagne as Emperor, a state founded on the sacredness of the Christian Church, Christendom was realized. The Patriarch of the Latin Church (the Pope) consecrated the emperors (he was a Caesar-like pope). Imagine the bewilderment that it would have caused to a messianic Christian to see the “successor” of the crucified Messiah, the Pope, crown the Roman emperor. The inversion was complete; the “messianic principle” had been confused with the principle of a religion that had negotiated being the very justification for a sacralized state (the Holy Roman Empire). This was particularly the case in the Byzantine Empire, where the Emperor de facto governed the Church7; when the Church criticized the empire—as in the case of John Chrysostom—it was punished (by the expelling of that patriarch—dubbed a rebel—from Constantinople). It was a “Cesar-like papacy”. It is clear that there were always great saints and prophets who critiqued the state of affairs, but they were always the minority more or less persecuted (by the State or the Church). That is how the history of a wrongly called Middle Age was developed. It was the age when Latino-Germanic Christendom (which pretended to be the City of God but was only the earthly city) was cornered, sieged, surrounded by the wall built by the Islamic civilization since 623, when the expansion of the Muslim religion began. From the seventh century to the end of the fifteenth century (exactly until 1492), the Latino-Germanic religion had been isolated from the Asian-African-Mediterranean system. As for the Eastern side of Christendom at Byzantium, which had expanded among the Slavs, it began losing ground and power because of the advance of Islam and the Ottoman Empire, culminating in the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Latino Christendom was more underdeveloped and insignificant than ever. The Islamic world from Córdoba and Fes (Andalusia and Morocco) to Fatimid Egypt, Bagdad as reference of the ancient system, Afghanistan, the Indian Moguls, the kingdoms of Indonesia around Malacca and present in Mindanao in the Philippines, crossing by the 7  What will happen centuries later in the Anglo-Saxon Christianity of the United Kingdom or the Lutheran countries of Northern Europe, which Thomas Hobbes will justify theologically in his work El Leviatán (FCE, Tercera Parte: México, 1998), 305–498, on “Of a Christian State” (modern fetishization of politics).

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Samarkand deserts of the silk road toward China,8 was the connection and the “center of the ancient world” (ancient for Adam Smith9). The Latino-­ Germanic Europe was only a peripheral world, isolated, feudal, in its own “dark age” (that contrasted with the “age of enlightenment”, of the “lights” of the Islamic classical world, urban, Aristotelian scientific, and mercantile).

Metropolitan Christendom and Colonial Christendom Suddenly, and without previous preparation, the Latino-Germanic Christendom of the periphery and underdeveloped began an expansion that would situate it in global geopolitics, in a way that it has not yet captured its profound transformation. To take consciousness of this new fact is exactly the objective of this article, a matter of which Christendom has not become aware after five centuries. It is not a small matter, and blindness to it is noticeable in the face of its evident global existence! Often, the most evident and obvious becomes the most hidden, confusing, and unknown. It is that which people hold as the quotidian healthy common sense that nobody puts into question. We must then put into question a quotidian evidence, which we must know how to assume, critique, and invert (to invert many inversions that were done without awareness of it, that is unintentionally, but no less responsible and grave, because we are talking about a structural sin that compounded and worsened for the last five centuries—from 1492 to today, upon the foundation of the previous nine centuries—from 623 to 1492). In point of fact, Latino-Germanic Christendom (not messianic Christianity) was surrounded by the Muslim world. With the Crusades, it attempted the false adventure of the fake recovery of the Holy Sepulcher (that space was essential geopolitically, for the commerce of the Italian mercantile cities, to rebuild the economic connection with Asia, the center of the global markets at that time), to open a route through the Muslim wall, but which was rejected by the strength of the Islamic kingdoms. Christendom was left as cornered as it was before. Meanwhile, Portugal, 8  A China that will begin in the eighteenth century the Industrial Revolution before England (see Kenneth Pomeranz. The Great Divergence. China, Europa and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000). 9  Giovanni Arrighi. Adam Smith in Beijing (London: Verso, 2007).

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finis terris of the west (of Europe), sought to open itself to Asian commerce by way of occupying ports and the coasts of Western Africa (the eastern Atlantic). It would be Spain, nevertheless, that after the expulsion of the last Muslims from Europe (from Granada on January 1492) attempted to get to China (the center of the markets of the known world) by way of the West. Christopher Columbus discovered the Atlantic and arrived at some lost islands in the Ocean via de West (which were thought to be China, according to Henricus Martellus10 maps of 1489. These maps were among other representations of China that arrived at Venice, of the discovery of America at the turn of the fifteenth century. They were later known in Portugal and in Freiburg, which allowed Waldseemüller in 1506 to create cartography of South America in a world map, as a fourth peninsula of China and as part of America in the south). The opening made by Europe toward the Atlantic (first by Spain and Portugal, and subsequently by Holland and other European nations in the Atlantic) was the beginning of the new age. The Modern Age was the death of the Mediterranean and the birth of the Atlantic. Europe unhinges and opens itself to the “wide world” through the new geopolitical center of sailing ships and commerce: Tropical Atlantic (in the regions dominated by Spain in connection with the Hispanic Caribbean in the sixteenth century11). Without becoming aware, Latino-Germanic Christendom—by way of the Atlantic at the South of Europe (Spain and Portugal before anyone else)—begins to build that new world: the New World (Hispanic America but not the Anglo Saxon one that would emerge in the seventeenth century) would be Latin America in the first place, a matter to which the present Eurocentric social sciences (in northern Europe and the United States of America) do not recognize. These series of events situated Latino Europe (Spanish and Portuguese) as metropolis of the colonial world, which was organized at the end of the fifteenth century (1492), before Northern Europe would wake up from its medieval sleep (Anglo Saxon, Germanic, Slav in the seventeenth). That is to say, a new disastrous determination is 10  See this problem in my work, The Invention of the Americas. Eclipse of the Other and the Myth of Modernity (New York: Continuum, 1995), 142 (just like all my works, it can be downloaded from www.enriquedussel.com). 11  It is not so strange then that modern theology and philosophy (before Luther and Descartes) begin in the Caribbean. On this beginning of theology and modern philosophy, see my work, Der Gegendiskurs der Moderne. Koelner Vorlesungen (Berlin: Turia-Kant Verlag, 2013).

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produced in the nature of Christendom (which was already a destructive inversion of early messianic Christianity). Besides being Christendom (the first inversion) it would now be a central and imperial Christendom, dominating the oppressed colonies in the name of the gospel of the Crucified one (second inversion). It crucified the indigenous in the name of the one that was crucified.12 It is for this reason that a Chilean indigenous person, painting the crucifixion, put in the place of Christ (or the poor Messiah as the Peruvian Inca Chronicler Guamán Poma de Ayala would call him) an Indian, and in the place of the (Roman) soldiers who crucified him Spanish soldiers from the Iberian Christendom. The indigenous painter had inverted the inversion; he placed on its feet what had been put on its head twice. If the Just was crucified: he had to be an Indian (because they were just and were not oppressing anyone). If the soldiers who crucified Christ were part of the oppressive empire that murdered the Just, it had to be the Spanish soldiers of Christendom—which was now metropolitan, central, and oppressor of colonies (as analogically Israel was during the Roman Empire) and which killed the indigenous peoples in the name of a metropolitan, distant, Roman Christendom. To think theologically from the oppressed colonial subjectivity, having critical consciousness of this “being colonial”,13 is in fact the theme of this reflection; that is already an act of adopting the perspective of an epistemological decolonizing of theology. And it is already the transcendental presupposition that conditions the possibility of all theological reflection. Bartolomé de las Casas,14 a messianic prophet at the beginning of modernity, began his struggle in 1514 in Sancti Espíritu (Cuba); the first anti-discourse of all of modernity (three years before Machiavelli would write The Prince and that Luther would fix his theses at Wittenberg) criticizes the injustice in oppressing the indigenous peoples as a result of the Papal Bulls in which the pope gave the Spanish Emperor the responsibility to “Christianize the Indians”. Bartolomé demonstrates that the pope had no power to grant the indigenous to the king of Spain because he had no rights over them. In the same fashion, the king of Spain had no rights over the members of a state who were not his subjects, and who enjoyed auton12  See Franz Hinkelammert. The Ideological Weapons of Death (New York: Orbis Books, 1986). 13  M. Heidegger would say: “being-colonial-in-the-world” (in-der-Welt-kolonial-Sein). 14  See this problem in my work Politics of Liberation. A Critical World History (London: SCM Press, 2011), pp. 182ff.

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omy and power based on their own institutions. At the beginning of the colonial structures (which after Spain and Portugal was continued by Holland, France, England, Denmark, etc., and today by the United States of America), Bartolomé showed that this coloniality is a structural sin, because the European Christians (the Latino-Germanic Christendom) had no right of organizing a colonial world. Nevertheless, during the controversy at Valladolid in the 1550, Ginés de Sepúlveda justified the need and convenience of European dominion over the peoples of the South, non-Christians, barbarians, immature children, who, by being conquered, gained participation in Christianity, that is, in the Mediterranean-European civilization. The worse thing is not that European Christianity elevated itself as the prototype of human culture as such (an unjustifiable pretention), of being the civilization with the right to dominate other peoples and cultures (as was expressed later singlehandedly by the Eurocentric European-North American colonialism that we have studied in multiple works15). Rather, it created from the beginning a world of domination which contradictorily was a colonial Latino Christendom. It baptized allegedly free barbarians and sovereigns to make them submissive Christians, dominated, colonials of a Christian Empire (thus imperial Christendom versus colonized Christendom). I say that it is a greater scandal to be merely an imperial Christendom because colonial Christendom, not the one from Spain, for example, but the one in Mexico or Brazil, which were formed by indoctrinated Christians by the Christendom of the center and Eurocentric. They would have to admit to be Christians in a secondary level and not only second-class colonial citizens. To be “second-class Christians” (of course not like the early messianic Christians of the Latino-Germanic Christendom which had inverted messianic Christianity) is to admit to passively reproduce and to become a disciple of a religion, a political structure, and a confused culture, because of the Latino European inversion of Christendom. Colonial Christians are second-class children of God. We have stated that Christmas was the subsuming of a Greco-Roman religious celebration—it was not messianic Christianity or Semite, the result of a valid transculturation that messianic Christianity carried out creatively in the face of the Mediterranean culture. Now, when the con15  See my work E.  Dussel. “Encuentros, Métodos Evangelizatorios y Conflictos”, in Introducción General a la Historia de la Iglesia en América Latina, t. I/1 de Historia General de la Iglesia en América Latina (Salamanca: Sígueme, 1983), pp. 336 ff.

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quistadors and evangelizers arrived to the Incan Empire, they observed that on June 21 in the great temple of the Sun in Cuzco, the Incas celebrated the Inti Raimi, the “birth of the Sun”. All the fires in all the homes across the empire were extinguished. Early in the morning at the great temple, the rays of the birthing Sun were captured, which hit a series of golden mirrors and lit up the cotton wick; it was the “sacred fire” produced by the Sun itself. The Inca Emperor distributed the “sacred fire” in all the provinces, villages, and homes, and fire would light up every family in the empire once again. The god Sun was its physical-real origin. Beautiful celebration of Christmas! But no; Quechuas and Aymaras had to abandon everything: their calendar, feasts, and symbols. Irrationally they had to adopt the liturgy of the Mediterranean Christendom of the northern hemisphere.16 This imposition, even liturgical, over the southern hemisphere was interpreted as the “universalization” of Christendom in the entire world. It was the pretention of one particular religion, the modern European culture, to elevate itself by the violence of weapons to a spurious and fetichized universality. The resurgence of the cultures of the south (Amerindians, Bantú, Islamic, from the Southeast or the Far East) demands the rethinking of the destructive modern utopia, built upon the pretention of the abstract universality of the Latino-Germanic Christendom, which oppressed all the peoples of the colonial South.

Epistemological Decolonization The modernity (which begins as we indicated in 1492) of a scientifically peripheral world in the so-called Middle Age (since its philosophy,17 mathematics, astronomy, etc., were originated in the Islamic and Chinese 16  I remember in my childhood in Argentina that in March or April we celebrated Easter, the feast of the resurrection of life. However, it took place in the autumn, when the leaves fell from the trees and nature dressed the sadness of the next winter. It was a sad Easter, which in the Northern Hemisphere was celebrated in the spring. In the same way in September, when life appeared after the harsh winter in the South, there was no celebration of life, but bland Sundays of Pentecost. A liturgical disaster! A ritual imposition of a fossilized Christianity of the North was forced on the South. The time will come in the Southern Hemisphere to change the liturgical year in six months in order to restore its meaning as among the Aymaras, Quechuas. and Mapuches, celebrating the Eucharist in the South with potatoes and chicha (and not bread and wine as in the North). 17  The path followed by philosophical renewal is a good example. Aristotle was rediscovered by Islamic thought through the influence of Byzantine Christians, and Al Kindi already practiced the thought of the stagirite in the ninth century. From there he passed to

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worlds, from the South and the East) after three centuries (the humanist and mercantile epoch hegemonized at the beginning by Spain and subsequently by Holland and England) placed itself as the center of the World-­ System (as I. Wallerstein calls it). Only with the industrial revolution and after the Chinese crisis (which begins the indicated revolution), the Enlightenment claimed that its culture was the only one with the possibilities to encompass the horizons of human universality as such. The German Romantics, as Walter Benjamin helps us see, claimed to be the historic culmination of humanity. Hegel is the best example of this Eurocentrism. For the professor at Berlin, history run from the East (the primitive) to the West (the culmination of the process), Christianity (read Romantic-­ Germanic Christendom) being the full realization of all religions; Europe was the full emergence of civilization: “England understood that it had to be the missionary of civilization for the whole world.”18 European culture and civilization as such (in the face of the barbarians from the other cultures) were one and the same thing. The four phenomena of modernity, Eurocentrism, colonialism, and capitalism are aspects of the same simultaneous contemporary processes and determinations: they emerge and develop at the same time (they will also come to an end at the same time). The classical theoretical expression of this complex historical reality is the Enlightenment (la ilustración, Aufklärung, le Siècle des Lumières). M. Horkheimer and Adorno did a first critique of the Enlightenment,19 but because they were not able to overcome their Eurocentrism, their critique was metropolitan, centered on a Europe as yet undiscovered as the center of the world-system. It was therefore a Eurocentric critique; that is to say, they still did not notice the racist Eurocentrism in the entire discourse of the Enlightenment. It was Samarkand, Buchara, and other cities, arriving in Córdoba in the eleventh century, and through translators from Toledo to Paris in the thirteenth century. Aristotelianism was anticipated in the Arab world in comparison to Paris by four centuries. Since the ninth century, Baghdad was the center of the study of mathematics (even the numbers are Arabic), of astronomy and other empirical sciences, which also came from China to Italy, along with the great technological discoveries (which have been taken in the West as inventions of Leonardo da Vinci, being that he simply copied drawings of books printed on paper in China in 1313 and that came to the hands of Pope Eugene IV, and from there to many publications of the Renaissance). See Dussel, Politics of Liberation, vol. I (London: SCM Editor, 2011). 18  Hegel. Vorlesungen ueber die Philosophie der Geschichte, IV, 3, 3, in Werke, vol. 12, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 538. 19  See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Dialektik der Aufklaerung (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1969).

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not an “epistemologically decolonizing” critique; they did not notice the colonial attitudes of modernity. It still moved in a horizon of the center. That attitude was the “hubris of point zero”20 shared by the great majority of intellectuals even by those of the European-North American critical thought up to the present. If there was a “linguistic turn” which discovered the importance of language in philosophy and the social sciences (as the one produced by the “Vienna Circle”), and if there was a “pragmatic turn” as proposed by Karl-­ Otto Apel, now we wish to talk about an epistemological “decolonizing turn”. The latter consists of taking critical consciousness of the postcolonial world of Eurocentrism as the place of expression of the discourse (locus enuntiationis) habitus, which was generalized by the thinker, the scientist, and the philosopher. Such Eurocentrism permeates profoundly the subjectivity of the theoretician and the objectivity of the theories (and human and social sciences); it is practically impossible to be liberated from the limitations that are accepted by all unanimously, by all the scientific communities, the theories, the research projects that, practically impedes overcoming its narrow and deforming limits. Frequently I take world history as an example, which is like a theoretical horizon of the social sciences. I ask: ¿How many of you have studied world history in a different periodization than the one proposed: Early Age, Middle Age, and Modern Age? I have never found someone who tells me that in their school, institute, or university they received a history of the world with a different periodization. No one remembers that this hypothesis of periodization is not more than two centuries old; that Novalis wrote that “we” (the romantics) invented the concept of antiquity21; and with that they invented the feudal Middle Age as a period of universal history (if we overcome Eurocentrism, such periodization is only valid for the  In the Renaissance, the painters first traced the horizon and fled all the objects they would paint to one point. That “point zero” will be, inadvertently, the very eye of the painter, but as his negative. That spot does not appear in the painting, but the whole picture is orchestrated from that vanishing point, not seen as the eye of the painter, although in reality it is omnipresent in the work. It is the absence of the cogito ego of all cogitatum. The cogitatum, of course, is the colonial being. 21  See “Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik“, in W.  Benjamin. Abhandlugen: Gesammelte Schriften, vol.I/1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), p.  116: “Erst jetzt faengt es wie der Antike; sie ist eigentlich nicht gegeben –sie ist nicht vorhanden- sondern sie soll von uns [Novalis and the romantics] erste hervorgebracht werden”. 20

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European Latino-Germanic culture, only a small part of humanity), and modernity would not be the cultural fruit of an exclusive creation of Europe (that began in the Renaissance, continued in the Protestant Reformation, and the French Enlightenment and English Parliament, leaving to the side the sixteenth century; that is to say: Spain, Portugal, the Atlantic, and Latin America), but it was the manipulation of the centrality of the world-system that owed much knowledge to the colonized cultures; knowledge that it never recognized where it came from. But Eurocentrism does not only deform all of history to prove the centrality of Europe “since ever”, as Max Weber did. Rather, with the Enlightenment it split Europe in two. “Southern” Europe that was important in its origins (but ceased to be in the eighteenth century, such as Greece, Rome, Spain, and Portugal), and “the heart of Europe”, “Northern” Europe, which as Hegel explains, includes Germany, Denmark, France, and England. That Northern Europe, which was industrial, capitalist, and mainly formed by Protestant Christendoms, was the most Eurocentric and metropolitan, because it developed an industrial capitalism, imperial (mainly with England) and in the present, globalized (with the United States of America). The social sciences (even psychoanalysis and Marxism) do not put into question the universality of the methods and objectives of the social sciences as they are presented in Europe. The other cultures that have been falling behind since the sixteenth century will develop in the future by imitating the sciences of Europe. This false “developmental fallacy” (the belief in the necessarily linear character of history, in the Europe that walks at the front of the necessary process, is left uncovered today because the processes of the colonial countries do not necessarily follow the processes followed by Europe, as in the case with Russia, India, Brazil, or especially China) is presupposed by all the actual social sciences. If we ask ourselves as a form of synthesis, how did the epistemological decolonizing turn begin? There is not a better description than Eduardo Mendieta’s, which resonates with my own description at the beginning of this article: The decolonial turn of the project of decolonizing the social sciences and within it epistemology, is a theoretical paradigm that emerged from the productive convergence and synthesis of at least five different theoretical/philosophical strands: Dusselian liberation philosophie, grounded in a Levinasian-

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Schellingian phenomenology that is married to a post-­Eurocentric, postHellenophilic, post-pax Americana hermeneutics with planetary reach; Wallerstenian world systems theory refracted through the lens of the Atlantic slave trade; the Quijano post-Eurocentric, post-­occidentalist critique of the coloniality of power; and the Fanonian phenomenological critique of the racial geography and corporeality of occidental reason; as has been elaborated eloquently by Lewis Gordon and Nelson Maldonado-Torres; and last but not least, Mignolian border gnosis and Nepantlism. Each of these currents is nourished by a formidable and extensive bibliography – veritable libraries.22

In fact, at the end of the decade of the 1960s emerged liberation philosophy, which inquired if it was possible to do philosophy in underdeveloped and peripheral countries. Note that the center-periphery issue was the original presupposition of such question. And it concluded that “the philosophy that knows how to think this reality, this actual world reality, not from the perspective of the center, from the cultural, rational, phalocratic, political, economic or military powers, but beyond the border itself of the actual central world, from the periphery. This philosophy will not be ideological. The reality of this philosophy is the whole earth and for it, the wretched of the earth are (they are not non-being) also reality.”23 Meanwhile, Wallerstein put a historical framing to Dependency Theory in his best work in 1974,24 which contextualized dependency within the world market (I have dealt with the concept of dependence in my 1988

22  E. Mendieta, “The Ethics of (Not) Knowing: Take Care of Ethics and Knowledge Will Come of Its Own Accord”, in A. M. Isasi-Díaz and E.  Mendieta (Eds.). Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), p.  261. On a non-Eurocentric ethic, see my work, Ethics of Liberation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 23  Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la Liberación (Mexico: Edicol, México, 1977) (translated into English, German, Italian, and Portuguese). The hypotheses were generated in 1969, years before the works of Edward Said and J. F. Lyotard. By using the category “center” (the metropolitan) and “periphery” (the colonial) the epistemological decolonization process would begin. 24  Immanuel Wallerstein. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1976). Two other volumes on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would follow. It is true that Wallerstein still did not know the importance of China that André Gunder Frank will begin to indicate in 1998 with his important work ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asia Age (Berkeley: University of California Press).

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work which was translated into English in 200125). Above we have already suggested the contributions by Franz Fanon. In addition, it must be observed that the originality of the proposal by Walter Mignolo26 started with the linguistic and semiotic disciplines, and underwent an evolution that allowed him to ask about the unwritten accounts of the originary cultures of the Americas. He felt compelled to create a categorical framing where “colonial difference” began to take a central place. Its theoretical development clarified the category of the “place of enunciation” of discourse, that once it assumed the entire problematic of “understanding” (Verstehen) and explaining (Erklären), culminated with the discovery of the colonial place from which a semiosis that is not necessarily written is enunciated, and which is fulfilled in the colonial statements. A plurotopical hermeneutics allows us to unravel the universe of meaning that makes sense only by adopting a colonial spectator-­ participant perspective; its import is fundamental in defining the actual epistemological decolonizing position. We cannot expand on the contributions on the “decolonial turn” by other participants in the movement such as Santiago Castro-Gómez, María Lugones, Nelson Maldonado, Linda Alcoff, Eduardo Mendieta, Lewis Gordon, and many others.

Epistemological Decolonization of Theology The theology of metropolitan (and colonizing) Latino-Germanic Christendom is perhaps the fifth essence, the spine of Eurocentrism (even more so than philosophy itself, although there is much dispute about who occupies the worst place in this ideology). Presenting the theologies of (non-messianic) Christianity as the religion par excellence makes it difficult for the members of Christendom to grant other religions their own pretension to universal truth.27 In a dogmatic position, theology is pre25  Enrique Dussel. Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1961–63 (London: Routledge, 2001). See especially cap. 13: “The Manuscripts of 1861–63 and the concept of dependency” (pp. 204–234). 26  See W. Mignolo. De la Hermenéutica y la Semiosis Colonial al Pensar Descolonial (Quito: Ediciones del Abya-Yala, 2011). 27  One can take seriously the “pretension to universal validity” at the time in which one honestly tries to prove, on one’s part, their own claim to universal validity. That knowing to leave a time of respect for the Other is necessary as a condition for the possibility of honest inter-religious and inter-theological dialogue.

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sented as being the only one that can be true, the universal. Revelation and choice are confused; the choice is confused as responsibility and the revelation is confused as privilege, as property, as disqualification of the claim to truth by other religions. Also, cultural, economic, or military domination is confused as having universal validity (because the others cannot defend themselves given the abysmal asymmetrical position they have). Even the great theologians of the twentieth century such as Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, and Jürgen Moltmann were, and could not-not be, Eurocentric. They creatively renewed European theologies but were unable to situate their subjectivity (even their corporality) within the “colonial space”, in the world of the colonized other. For its part, Vatican II “fixed” or resolved the distance of the Church with the Enlightenment through an intra-European ecumenism, but not with the colonial world.28 F. Eboussei Boulaga, in his ontological description of the African colonial being,29 described the tearing of such divided colonial subjectivity like this: One part African (thanks to its languages, traditions, and references to ancestral community, the “ethical-mythical nucleus” Ricoeur would say), and one part attempting the impossible, which is to imitate the European colonizer imposed by the received formation in education, and the exigencies made by the academy. The objective of the colonized is “to persuade, to draw attention to the one who still is their master so that it recognizes”.30 Thus, the best European theology was taught to the Latin American, African, and Asian students who filled the classrooms of the European universities. These institutions formed them in such a way that, as J.  P Sartre would describe it, when their teacher proclaimed from Europe “Parthenon”, in a lost corner of the South someone would repeat as in an echo: “enon”. It meant a “brain washing” (which in the sixteenth century was called the method of the “tabula rasa”). The students from the South were transformed into Eurocentric intellectuals; later returning to their cultural spaces of origin, they found themselves in a colonized world, alienated from their own culture, and from their own popular religious imaginary. Many times, those Latin American Eurocentric intellectuals 28  That is why we became aware that the Medellín Conference was concerned with the issue of a peripheral culture, such as Latin America, absent from the Second Vatican Council. 29  F.  Eboussei Boulaga. La crise du Muntu. Authenticité Africaine et Philosophie (Paris: Présence africaine, 1977). 30  Ibid., p.  7. This is the danger of the “struggle for recognition” on the horizon of a Eurocentric position proposed by A. Honneth.

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would attempt titanically to uproot their disciples from their own culture of the South and graft them on to the European culture (which was their own). Other times, when they resisted and criticized Eurocentrism, they confronted failure and hostility in their own church, when they opposed its Europeanization (the church was completely Europeanized by the bishops who were formed in specialized Roman Colleges, in which the universality of the Church was identical to being a modernized European). And even in other times, impatient with the received formation, they attempted to return to their ancestral customs but without the required formation; they were lost in an endless labyrinth without an exit. Only in very few instances, which was the road taken by Latin American liberation theology, did a community of theologians assume collectively the responsibility of thinking with their own heads and created a new theology which was not colonized. In order to do that, it had to draw from the critical social sciences that Eurocentric theology had never used (as Marxism, psychoanalysis, a non-Eurocentric history, etc.). But this new theology was persecuted, not so much for its content but because of its attempt to think from outside of Europe and against the modern, capitalist, metropolitan, Eurocentric, male chauvinist, racist Europe that had confounded its own particularity with a claim to Universality. Eurocentric theology, and the equally Eurocentric and metropolitan structures of Latino-Germanic Christendom and of the church, could not afford the critique of a decolonized theological thinking. And if Latin American liberation theology had a special perception concerning the issues of poverty, then, African theology had a special aspect of importance concerning ancestral communitarian culture, and Asian theology, facing greater difficulties, was not understood at all in Rome. For example, the Sri Lankan Tissa Balasuriya, friend and companion of the first hours of EATWOT (Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians that we found in 1976 in Dar-es-­ Salaam), was condemned for wondering31 if there was more than one incarnation of the Word (which is a theological problem that demands a specific treatment, and which cannot be avoided in the ecumenical dialogue among the existing world religions). The question alone is already condemnable in a Eurocentric theology. 31  I insist: the very act of “questioning” was already a problem, because he did not answer the question but rather problematized it in light of the demands of Asian inter-religious dialogue. For a Eurocentric Christian the question itself stands as shocking, whereas in Asia it is obligatory.

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The epistemological decolonization of theology is a fact that began during the second half of the twentieth century, but which will last the entire twenty-first century. It would seem as if the Euro-North American churches have dropped the ball on this matter, organizing great questions and allowing new and better answers for the future theology. It is hard for the theologians of the center to overcome the narrow horizons of a culture, which despite its great development shows gigantic flaws in responding to ecological concerns, lacking respect for the reality of the universe, life, and cultural alterity. It is hard for the theologians of the center to be open to the Oriental “patience”, the liturgical vitality of the African rhythm, and to developing the sensibilities for the oppressed and humiliated in Latin America. The epistemological decolonization of theology begins by situating ourselves in a new space from which, as locus enuntiationis and original hermeneutic, it will be necessary to redo theology as a whole. In the transmodern age that comes (beyond modernity and capitalism) a trans-­ theology will be equally necessary, beyond the Latino-Germanic Christendom, Eurocentric, and metropolitan that ignored the colonial world, and especially the colonial Christendoms (of Latin America, part of Africa, and the Christian minorities in Asia32). Such theology will have to overcome coloniality and capitalist modernity by inverting Christendom in order to reclaim an entirely renewed messianic Christianity.

32  Asian Christians, as a religious minority, either return to being Messianic, as at the Christian origins, or fail when they try to impose Christendom, which is a culture and not a religion. Mateo Ricci sought to clearly separate the two, but he was persecuted by Rome and his project failed. However, the question must be raised again, because it is at the heart of future evangelization.

CHAPTER 3

Towards a Decolonial Theology: Perspectives from the Caribbean Luis N. Rivera-Pagán

Introduction I originate from Puerto Rico, a Caribbean island that has been aptly described by a foremost juridical scholar as “the oldest colony of the world.”1 Christopher Columbus claimed possession of the island for the crown of Castile in 1493 and, after the defeat of a desperate native insurrection during the second decade of the sixteenth century, it remained part of the Spanish empire till 1898, when it was conquered by the United States. The transfer of imperial sovereignty from Madrid to Washington was accomplished through the two classical ways of solving conflicts among powerful nations: war and diplomacy. War was perpetrated in the tropical Caribbean and the Philippines; diplomacy was negotiated later in elegant

1  José Trías Monge, Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

L. N. Rivera-Pagán (*) Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_3

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and cosmopolitan Paris.2 No need to consult the natives. Washington, Madrid, and Paris were the sites of privileged historical agency. In early 1898 Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony; at the end of that fateful year, it had become a colony of the United States. It was the end of the Spanish imperial saga and the initial stages of imperial pax americana.3 It was part and parcel of the Age of Empire, so aptly named by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm.4 From the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii, in the Pacific, to Cuba and Puerto Rico, in the Caribbean, the American ideology of manifest destiny, with its vigorous religious undertones, aggressive military perspectives, and strong commercial interests, was transgressing national boundaries.5 The military conquest of those Pacific and Caribbean nations, according to the president of the United States, William McKinley, took place “under the providence of God and in the name of human progress and civilization.”6 We have learnt much from Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Walter Mignolo about colonial discourse and postcolonial critique.7 Even before these four distinguished émigrés, there were the crucial analyses of colonial ideology and mentality drafted by Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi.8 There is also the critical examination of the strategies of coloniality—military power, economic domination, racial hierarchy, cultural

2  The war between the United States and Spain concluded with the Treaty of Paris, signed December 10, 1898. Spain, militarily defeated, was forced to relinquish its dominion over the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the new American colossus. Alfonso García Martínez, ed., Libro rojo/Tratado de París: Documentos presentados a las cortes en la legislatura de 1898 por el ministro de Estado (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1988). 3  Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 2017). 4  Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987). 5  A classic exposition of the North American ideological mythological construct of “manifest destiny” is Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study Of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1935). 6  Quoted in Kinzer, The True Flag, 132. 7  Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Gayatri C. Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1998); Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1995). 8  Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968); Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965).

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arrogance—by the Peruvian Aníbal Quijano.9 The colonized subjects providing theoretical paradigms to their colonizers? Dislocated, “out of place”10 Third World intellectuals giving lessons to the masters of the world and challenging their epistemic dominion? Quite a paradox of these postcolonial times! Imperial power comprises at least three interrelated domains: political subordination, material appropriation, and ideological justification. Colonial discourse mystifies imperial dominion. It diffuses and affirms imperial ideological hegemony. It crafts by persuasion what the mechanisms of coercion are unable to achieve: the fine-tuned consent and admiration of the colonized subjects. “Rulers who aspire to hegemony… must make out an ideological case that they rule…. on behalf of their subjects.”11 Its greatest creation is what V. S. Naipaul has called mimic men.12 In 1493 the Spaniards came to Puerto Rico with the proclaimed purpose of converting its idolatrous inhabitants to the one and only true religion, Christianity, to teach them how to live according to the European ethical norms of a civil and ordered society, and, as concurrent objective, to reap substantial material benefits for the imperial purveyors of those spiritual goods.13 As Christopher Columbus wrote in his 1493 report of his transoceanic exploration: “All Christendom ought to feel joyful and make celebrations and give solemn thanks to the Holy Trinity with many solemn prayers for the turning of so many peoples to our holy faith… and afterwards for material benefits, since not only Spain but all Christians will hence have refreshment and profit.”14

9  Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina,” Anuario Mariateguiano, 9, núm. 9, 1998, 113–121; “The Colonial Nature of Power and Latin America’s Cultural Experience,” en R. Briceño & H. R. Sonntag, Sociology in Latin America (Social Knowledge: Heritage, Challenges, Perspectives), Proceedings of the Regional Conference of the International Association of Sociology (Caracas, 1998), 27–38; “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla, No. 3, 2000, 533–580. 10  Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1999). 11  James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 18. 12  V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (New York, Macmillan, 1967). 13  Enrique Dussel, 1492: el encubrimiento del Otro (Santafé de Bogotá: Ediciones Antropos, 1992). 14  Christopher Columbus, A New and Fresh English Translation of the Letter of Columbus Announcing the Discovery of America, translated and edited by Samuel Eliot Morison (Madrid: Gráficas Yagües, 1959), 15.

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In 1898 the Americans came to impart upon us, poor tropical barbarians, the blessings of liberty, justice, humanity, and enlightened civilization. To crown its generosity, in 1917, without consulting “the Inhabitants of Porto Rico” (again, who cares about the views and feelings of colonized subjects?), Washington bestowed upon us the gift of American citizenship. That citizenship has allowed our people to participate in the military adventures of Washington to extend its “empire of freedom,” from the First World War trenches to the streets of Kabul and Baghdad. As an added bonus, we do not need to mess with any of the crucial decisions regarding our political condition and fate. We can rest assured that those decisions, usually important dimensions of democratic sovereignty, are well taken care of by the wisdom and benevolence of the powers that be in Washington. How fortunately colonial we Puerto Ricans have been! Maybe this is another occasion to reiterate Gayatri Spivak’s famous query, “can the subaltern speak?” A question that Edward Said dared to answer affirmatively: “Indeed, the subaltern can speak, as the history of liberation movements in the twentieth century eloquently attests.”15

Coloniality, Migration, and Diaspora To the ambivalence of a postcolonial colony, whose residents as citizens of the empire can claim in the courts the civil liberties of their citizenship but not its political rights, we should add the crucial fact that more than half of the Puerto Rican population resides in mainland United States.16 Legally, those Puerto Ricans are not migrants. Psychologically and culturally, they are. They belong to the history of modern diasporas. And diasporas are the source of the bewildering multiculturalism of the postmodern mega cities. Migration and diaspora are crucial dimensions of human history.17 They constitute an experience shared by many former and present colonial peoples all over the world. Nowadays they have also become important themes 15  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the subaltern speak?,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (25th anniversary edition) (New York: Random House, 2003), 335. 16  Angelo Falcón, Atlas of Stateside Puerto Ricans (Washington, DC: Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, 2004). 17  As Princeton University professor Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones has beautifully shown, in his book El arte de bregar: ensayos (San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2000), Puerto Rican culture

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of conversation in postcolonial cultural studies.18 But, as Homi Bhabha has stressed, diaspora is an important object of critical analysis because it is the sociohistorical existential context of many displaced Third World peoples: “For the demography of the new internationalism is the history of postcolonial migration, the narratives of cultural and political diaspora . . . the poetics of exile.”19 Diaspora entails dislocation, displacement, but also a painful and complex process of forging new strategies to articulate cultural differences and identifications. In the Western cosmopolis, with its heterogeneous and frequently conflicting ethnocultural minorities that belie the mythical e pluribus unum, the émigré exists in ambivalent tension. More than half a century ago, Franz Fanon brilliantly described the peculiar gaze of so many white French people at the growing presence of Black Africans and Caribbeans in their national midst.20 Scorn and fear are entwined in that stare. The diasporic person frequently feels, alas, “like a man without a passport who is turned away from every harbour,” the anguished dread that haunts the persecuted whisky priest of Graham Greene’s magnificent novel, The Power and the Glory.21 Frequently, nostalgia grips his or her soul, in the beautiful words of a painful biblical lamentation: By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. ... How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? (Psalm 137:1, 4 (NRSV))

Often, however, and sometimes simultaneously, the displacement of migration creates anew a space of liberation from the atavistic constraints cannot be genuinely assessed if the creativity of its diaspora community is neglected or its significance diminished. 18  Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton, eds., Borders, Exiles, Diasporas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 19  Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 5. 20  Franz Fanon, Peau Noir, Masques Blancs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952). 21  Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (London: Penguin Books, 1990, orig. 1940), 102.

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and bondages of the native cultural community and opens new vistas, perspectives, and horizons. To repressed persons, exile in a metropolis like London, Paris, or New  York could convey an expansion of individual autonomy, even if its sinister hidden side might turn out to be despair or death.22 Diasporic existence, as Bhabha has so forcefully reiterated, questions fixed and static notions of cultural and communal identity. In the diaspora, identity is not conceived as a pure essence to be nostalgically preserved, but as an emancipatory project to be fashioned, in an alien territory, in a foreign language, as a polyphonic process of creative imagination. In many instances, yet, “the restoration of a collective sense of identity and historical agency in the home country may well be mediated through the diaspora.”23 As Walter Mignolo has so provocatively asserted,24 diaspora, as a site of critical enunciation, compels the rethinking of the geopolitical distinction, so dear to many Third World thinkers, between center and periphery, and elicits a border thinking that changes not only the content, but also the terms of intellectual global dialogue. The émigré’s cultural differences produce subaltern significations that resist the cultural cannibalism of the metropolitan melting pot. Diasporic communities are, to quote Bhabha once more, “wandering peoples who will not be contained within the Heim of the national culture and its unisonant discourse, but are themselves the marks of a shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation.”25 Migration has become one of the main issues for theories of human rights and theological creativity done in solidarity with the pains and sorrows of displaced communities. Diasporic displacement has been an essential and historical consequence of imperial domination. “There are 65

22  This was the case for two creative Caribbean writers, marginalized and despised in their homelands, the Cuban Reinaldo Arenas and the Puerto Rican Manuel Ramos-Otero, who found in New York a wider horizon for their literary talents, a greater realm of personal freedom, and AIDS related death. See Rubén Ríos-Avila, “Caribbean Dislocations: Arenas and Ramos Otero in New York,” in Sylvia Molloy and Robert M. Irwin, eds., Hispanisms and Homosexualities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 101–122. 23  Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton, “Introduction,” Borders, Exiles, Diasporas, 5. 24  Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 25  The Location of Culture, 164.

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million displaced persons around the globe… And the mass drowning of migrants has become so routine that it scarcely qualifies as news.”26 We have seen, during this last decade, a tragic outcome in many Western and Northern nations: extreme xenophobia. But it also conveys urgent challenges to the ethical sensitivity of religious people and persons of good will.27 The first step we need to take is to perceive this issue from the perspective of the migrants, to pay cordial (that is, deep from our hearts) attention to their stories of suffering, hope, courage, resistance, ingenuity, and, as so frequently happens in the wildernesses of the American Southwest or deep in the Mediterranean waters, death.28 Many of the unauthorized migrants have become nobodies, in the apt title of John Bowe’s book, disposable people, in Kevin Bales’ poignant phrase, or, as Zygmunt Bauman poignantly reminds us, wasted lives.29 They are the Empire’s new μέτοικοi, douloi, modern servants. Their dire existential situation cannot be grasped without taking into consideration the upsurge in global inequalities in these times of unregulated international financial hegemony.30 For many human beings the excruciating alternative is between misery in their Third World homeland and marginalization in the rich West/North, both fateful destinies intimately linked together.31 The existential dislocation of diaspora, its cultural hybridity, recreates the complex intertwined ethnic and racial sources of many migrant communities. Asked to whom does she owe allegiance, Clare, the Jamaican protagonist of Michelle Cliff’s novel No Telephone to Heaven, replies: “I 26  Jason DeParle, “The Sea Swallows People,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. LXIV, No. 3, February 23, 2017, 31. 27  Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, “Xenophilia or Xenophobia: Towards a Theology of Migration,” The Ecumenical Review (World Council of Churches), Vol. 64, No. 4, December 2012, 575–589. 28  See the poignant article by Jeremy Harding, “The Deaths Map,” London Review of Books, Vol. 33, No. 20, 20 October 2011, 7–13. 29  John Bowe, Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy (New York: Random House, 2007); Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity, 2004). 30  Slavoj Žižek, Refugees, Terror and other Troubles with the Neighbors (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2016). 31  Branko Milanovic, “Global Inequality and the Global Inequality Extraction Ratio: The Story of the Past Two Centuries,” (The World Bank, Development Research Group, Poverty and Inequality Group, September 2009); Peter Stalker, Workers Without Frontiers: The Impact of Globalization on International Migration (Geneva: International Labor Organization, 2000).

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have African, English, Carib in me.”32 She is a mestiza moving between Kingston, New York, and London, searching for a place to call home, torn between the quest for solidarity in the forging of a common identity and the lure of solitude in a strange land. To be part of a pilgrim diaspora is a difficult and complex challenge, which, to avoid utopian illusions, must be faced having in mind the superb irony of that master of twentieth-century skepticism, himself a displaced wanderer, James Joyce: “We were always loyal to lost causes . . . Success is for us the death of the intellect and of the imagination.”33 From the margins of empires and metropolitan centers of powers, the crossroads of borders and frontiers, in the proximity of so many different and frequently conflictive cultural worlds, in the maelstroms of the global mega cities and the virtual imagined communities of the internet, arise constantly new challenges to the international structures of power and control.34 There colonial discourses meet their nemesis: postcolonial defiance. In the ecumenicity of diaspora, to quote again Bhabha, “we must not change merely the narratives of our histories, but transform our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and different places, both human and historical.”35 It is usually there, in the counter invasion of the “others,” the colonized barbarians, deep into the realms of the lords of the world, that the silenced peoples find the sonority of their voices and reconfigure their historical sagas into meaningful human stories. The quasi-beastly shadows of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) dare to disrupt the imperial monologue. They hybridize the language of the colonizers to reshape and narrate their own histories. As Chinua Achebe, engaged in a critical dialogue with the specter of Conrad, has so eloquently written in a text significantly titled Home and Exile, “My hope for the twenty-first [century] is that it will see the first fruits . . . of the process of ‘re-storying’ peoples who had been knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession.”36 For the early Christian communities, diaspora was a constant perspective in their way of living and understanding their faith, as expressed in a 32  Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Plume Books, 1996, orig. 1987), 189. 33  James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1946, orig. 1914), 131–132. 34  Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004). 35  The Location of Culture, 256. 36  Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 79.

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letter written by an anonymous Christian author in the second or third century: “They [Christians] take part in everything as citizens and put up with everything as foreigners. Every foreign land is their home, and every home a foreign land.”37 The Bible itself, as a canonic sacred text, is a literary creature of the diaspora,38 for the Old Testament was born from the sufferings of the dispersed Hebrew nation and the New Testament was written in the koine Greek, the lingua franca of many diasporic peoples of the Hellenistic age. The New Testament faith is, in many ways, a devout endless wandering, by a community of “aliens and exiles” (I Peter 2:11), to the unreachable ends of the world and times, in search of God and solidarity. The concept of diaspora could thus be a significant crossroad of encounter, a dialectical hinge, between postcolonial cultural studies and theological hermeneutics.39 Compelled diaspora and exile, caused by violent imperial invasion, are essentials elements in the biblical narratives. The desolation and destruction of the city of Jerusalem and its sacred temple, the dislocation and displacement suffered by its inhabitants, entailed a grave crisis of cultural and religious identity, the possibility of national dissolution, and the imposition of absolute hopelessness. Only the arousal of the strong prophetic voice advocating hope in the promises of Yahweh the Liberator was able to sustain courage in the midst of utter devastation. Diaspora and exile are part and parcel of modern history and disturb deeply the identity of the displaced. For “identity – who we are, where we come from, what we are – is difficult to maintain in exile… We are the ‘other’, an opposite, a flaw in the geometry of resettlement, an exodus.”40 Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2009 social encyclical Caritas in veritate, rightly reminded the global community of the urgent necessity to develop that kind of international and ecumenical perspective of migration:

37  “The Epistle to Diognetus,” in Johannes Quasten and Joseph C. Plumpe, eds., Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation, vol. 6 (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1961), 139. 38  Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology of Exile (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002). 39  René Krüger, La diáspora: De experiencia traumática a paradigma eclesiológico (Buenos Aires: ISEDET, 2008). 40  Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 16–17.

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[M]igration . . . is a striking phenomenon because of the sheer numbers of people involved, the social, economic, political, cultural and religious problems it raises . . . [We] are facing a social phenomenon of epoch-making proportions that requires bold, forward-looking policies of international cooperation . . . We are all witnesses of the burden of suffering, the dislocation and the aspirations that accompany the flow of migrants . . . [T]hese laborers cannot be considered as a commodity or a mere workforce. They must not, therefore, be treated like any other factor of production. Every migrant is a human person who, as such, possesses fundamental, inalienable rights that must be respected by everyone and in every circumstance. (Caritas in veritate, 62)

Puerto Ricans constitute an important part of the US Latino/Hispanic population, that sector of the American society whose growth, in the view of many, enriches multicultural diversity, but has also led Samuel P. Huntington to warn that it constitutes a “major potential threat to the cultural and possibly political integrity of the United States.”41 How interesting that the former prophet of the “clash of civilizations,” beyond the frontiers of the American colossus, became the apostle of the “clash of cultures,” within its borders. According to this eminent Harvard professor, the main problem of Latino/Hispanics is not the illegality in which many of them incur to reside in the United States, but the threat they represent to the American national identity and its allegedly traditional “Anglo-Protestant” culture. In that clash of cultures, we Puerto Ricans are distinguished warriors. We excel in the “double consciousness,” the transculturation, and the border thinking that Walter Mignolo has so suggestively rescued from the African American W. E. B. Dubois, the Cuban Fernando Ortiz, and the Chicana Gloria Anzaldúa. In Puerto Rico, we take delight in our Spanish language, in the mainland we share the linguistic fate of the diaspora, we experience “the pain and perverse pleasure of writing in a second language,” in the words of that exceptional Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot.42 The experience of heteroglossia, of thinking, speaking, and writing in a different language, opens unexpected spaces for a heterodox understanding of the hybridizing encounters of peoples and cultures. For, 41  Samuel P.  Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 243. 42  Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), xv.

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as Mikhail Bakhtin has written so adeptly, “the word lives, as it were, on the boundary between its own context and another, alien, context.”43 The colonial situation, encompassing its political and juridical subjugation, its ensuing cultural symbiosis, and the persisting socioeconomics inequities constitute the historical matrix of many modern diasporas and, thus, a crucial source of the multicultural collisions in the imperial metropolitan centers. In the words of William Schweiker, University of Chicago professor of theological ethics, International cities are a ‘place’ in which people’s identities, sense of self, others, and the wider world, as well as values and desires, are locally situated but altered by global dynamics . . . The compression of the world found in massive cities is thus a boon for the formation of new self-understandings, especially for dislocated peoples . . . This is especially pointed when those ‘others’ are implicated in histories of suffering. The compression of the world confronts us with the problem of how to live amid others, even enemies.44

The postmodern and postcolonial mega cities compress times and spaces into borderlands of cultures, religiosities, traditions, and values. There it is impossible to evade the gaze of the others and the primordial biblical question—“am I my brother’s keeper?”—acquires new connotations and urgency. A new sensitivity has to be forged to the rendering ambivalences, the sorrows and joys, of diasporic existence of the peoples who live day and night with the uncanny feeling of existing as Gentile aliens within the gates of holy Jerusalem. In the borderlands, a new poetic of political resistance is developed, as the late Gloria Anzaldúa so hauntingly perceived: In the Borderlands you are the battleground where enemies are kin to each other; you are at home, a stranger . . . To survive in the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads.45 43  Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006), 284. 44  William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics In the Time of Many Worlds (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 6–7. 45  Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999), 216–217.

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Theology and Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Observation It is not surprising that Bible scholars—Fernando Segovia, R.  S. Sugirtharajah, Stephen D. Moore, Musa Dube, Roland Boer, Tat-Siong Benny Liew, Richard Horsley, and Leo G. Perdue, among others—have been first and foremost among the theological disciplines to pay close attention to postcolonial and decolonizing theories.46 After all, it is impossible to evade the pervasive ubiquity of empires, imperial conquests, and anti-colonial resistances in the Jewish-Christian sacred Scriptures. The geopolitical expansions or contractions of the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian (Ptolemaic and Seleucid), and Roman empires constitute the main historical substratum of the entire biblical corpus. And let there be no doubt, imperial conquest constitutes a grave violation of human integrity. “There is no system of domination that does not produce its own routine harvest of insults and injury to human dignity.”47 From the Exodus saga to the anti-Roman apocalyptic visions of Revelation48 only a fruitless strategy of hermeneutical evasion would be able to suppress the importance of imperial hegemony in the configuration of human existence and religious faith in the Bible.49 The dolorous cry of the conquered people was constant,

46  Stephen D. Moore and Fernando Segovia, Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections (London/New York: T & T Clark, 2005); R.  S. Sugirtharajah, ed., The Postcolonial Bible (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998); R. S. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); R. S. Sugirtharajah, ed., The Postcolonial Biblical Reader (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006); Musa W. Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2000); Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and Empire: the Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003); Richard A. Horsley, Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997); Richard A. Horsley, Paul and the Roman Imperial Order (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2004); Leo G. Perdue and Warren Carter, edited by Coleman A Baker, Israel and Empire: A Postcolonial History of Israel and Early Judaism (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 47  Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 37. 48  João B. Libânio e Maria Clara L. Bingemer, Escatologia Cristã: O Novo Céu e a Nova Terra (Petrópolis, Brasil: Vozes, 1985); Pablo Richard, Apocalipsis: reconstrucción de la esperanza (San José: DEI, 1994) and Brian K. Blount, Can I Get a Witness?: Reading Revelation Through African American Culture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005). 49  Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).

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Here we are, slaves to this day—slaves in the land that you gave to our ancestors to enjoy its fruit and its good gifts. Its rich yield goes to the kings [the Persian monarchy] whom you have set over us because of our sins; they have power also over our bodies and over our livestock at their pleasure, and we are in great distress. (Nehemiah 9:36–37)

Even a comprehensive study of gender and sex in the Bible has to take into consideration the different ways in which Esther and Judith use their female sexuality in critical historical instances in which the fate of the children of Abraham is at the stake of a powerful empire. How to forget that Jesus was executed by the Roman authorities as a political subversive? He was exposed to the horrendous rituals of moral denigration and physical assaults that traditionally constitute the tragic fate of colonized subjects who dare to defy imperial arrogance and dominion. Any theory of atonement that elides the intense political drama of the last days of Jesus transforms it in an abstract unhistorical dogma, or in a display of tasteless masochism à la Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004). Thus, it was to be expected that biblical scholars would be the first in the academic fields of religious studies to incorporate the emphases on geopolitical hegemony and resistance provided by postcolonial theories to the array of other contemporary hermeneutical perspectives. The question raised by R. S. Sugirtharajah, however, is poignant indeed: One of the weighty contributions of postcolonial criticism has been to put issues relating to colonialism and imperialism at the center of critical and intellectual inquiry . . . What is striking about systematic theology is the reluctance of its practitioners to address the relation between European colonialism and the field. There has been a marked hesitancy to critically evaluate the impact of the empire among systematic theologians.50

To be fair, some theologians are beginning to awake from their disciplinary slumber to take into serious consideration the crucial issues of geopolitical power. Creative theologians, like Catherine Keller, Mark Lewis Taylor, Kwok Pui-lan, Wonhee Anne Joh, Mayra Rivera, Joerg Rieger, and others, have begun to face with intellectual rigor and ­rhetorical

50   R.  S. Sugirtharajah, “Complacencies and Cul-de-sacs: Christian Theologies and Colonialism,” in Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera, Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2004), 22.

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elegance the challenges raised by postcolonial studies and dialogues.51 For those studies and dialogues, the Caribbean, just where I happen to live and work, might be a fine place to start. Let me explain this last statement that many of you might find rather perplexing. Fernando Segovia has written a precise and concise exposition of the convergence between biblical scholarship and postcolonial studies.52 Never an uncritical reader, Segovia raises several poignant critiques to the latter. Two of them are particularly relevant to the argument I want to develop: First, the lack of attention, by most postcolonial intellectuals, to the Latin American and Caribbean Iberian imperial formations as they developed between the end of the fifteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth.53 Second, the scarcity of analysis of religion as a crucial dimension of the imperial-colonial ideological frameworks. To quote Segovia on this second issue: It is almost as if religious texts and expressions did not form part of the cultural production and as if religious institutions and practices did not belong to the social matrix of imperial-colonial frameworks. I would argue . . . that religion is to be acknowledged and theorized as a constitutive component of such frameworks, and a most important one.54

The existential relevance of both issues for Segovia, a Cuban-born person who describes himself as “a student of religion in general and of the Christian faith in particular,” seems obvious. I, as another Caribbean-born student of religion and theological ideas, share both concerns. It is hard to deny that Segovia is partially right, for he is referring to the postcolonial cultural studies as they emerged from the twilight of the 51  Catherine Keller, God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005); Mark Lewis Taylor, Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Powers and American Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005); Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005); Wonhee Anne Joh, Heart of the Cross: a Postcolonial Christology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006); Joerg Rieger, Christ & Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007); Keller, Nausner, and Rivera, Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (2004). 52  Fernando Segovia, “Mapping the Postcolonial Optic in Biblical Criticism: Meaning and Scope,” in Moore and Segovia, Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 23–78. 53  Ibid., 73. 54  Ibid., 74–75.

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European empires that developed in the wake of the Enlightenment. What has been named by some British historians as the classic age of Empire is the basic matrix whence the critical texts of Said, Bhabha, and Spivak emerge. Even a very useful introductory text in the field, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, edited by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, proceeds as if the sixteenth-century Iberian empires never existed or as if religious discourses have never been used as motivation for conquest and colonization.55 The end result of those analytical occlusions is the homogenization of imperial experiences and, therefore, of colonial defiance.56 In many postcolonial texts we learn a lot about the multifarious resonances of the notorious 1835 Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education, but almost nothing about the intense theological controversies, juridical disputes, and philosophical debates (Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de las Casas, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, José de Acosta) during the sixteenth-­ century Spanish conquest of the Americas, despite the fact that they ­anticipate most of the latter colonial and anti-colonial discourses.57 The discussion by Vitoria about the justice of the wars against the Native Americans foreshadows all posterior arguments on the legitimacy of 55  Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London and New  York: Routledge, 1998). Sometimes their disregard for the sixteenthcentury imperial formations leads them into egregious mistakes, like asserting that “in 1503, Bishop Las Casas . . . proposed . . . systematic importation of blacks” as “an alternative to indigenous labor” (ibid., 212). In 1503 Bartolomé de Las Casas was not yet a bishop and he did not propose to bring Black slaves to the new Spanish territories till the middle of the second decade of that century. Cf. Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), 180–195. See also Luis N.  Rivera-Pagán, “Freedom and Servitude: indigenous Slavery in the Spanish Conquest of the Caribbean,” General History of the Caribbean. Volume I: Autochthonous Societies, edited by Jalil Sued-Badillo (London: UNESCO Publishing and Macmillan Publishers, 2003), 316–362. Several of their statements regarding Latin America are not to be trusted (“the slave system . . . persisted in the Caribbean and some South American areas until the 1830s” [ibid., 214]—whereas slavery was not abolished in Puerto Rico until 1873, in Cuba until 1886, and in Brazil until 1888), which only shows the lack of attention of some postcolonial scholars to the colonial history of Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean. 56  Curiously, Chinua Achebe is mentioned once in Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s textbook, but his 1958 classic novel, Things Fall Apart, one of the foremost literary assessments of the convergence between European colonization of African and Christian missions, is not even alluded to. 57  Enrique Dussel, Política de la liberación. Historia mundial y crítica (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2007), 186–210.

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i­ mperial wars.58 The dispute between Las Casas and Sepúlveda about the rationality of the Native Americans and the adequacy of conversion by conquest inaugurates a long series of similar latter debates.59 The lengthy treatise of Acosta on the Christianization and civilization of the American “barbarians” is paragon of subsequent analogous imperial justifications.60 Segovia is therefore right in his critique to the mainstream postcolonial studies. Yet, his critique reiterates that same mistake. He also excludes, from the rather porous and vague boundaries of postcolonial studies, authors who do in fact pay serious attention to both the Iberian sixteenth-­ century imperial formations and, as an unavoidable consequence, to the role of religious discourses in those geopolitical structures of control and dominion. The initial shaping of European global imperial expansion in Latin America and the Caribbean during the sixteenth century, in conjunction with the emergence of early modernity, capitalist accumulation, transatlantic slave trade, the proclamation of the Christian gospel as imperial ideology, and the othering of non-European peoples have been topics of rigorous academic research and publications by two Argentinean émigrés, Walter Mignolo and Enrique Dussel.61 Lewis Hanke and Anthony Pagden62 have also dealt extensively with that complex configuration of themes, engaging frequently in a comparative critical analysis with more 58  Francisco de Vitoria, “On the American Indians” (De indis, I), Political Writings, trans. Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 231–292. 59  Bartolomé de las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, trans. Stafford Poole (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992). 60  José de Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute (2 vols.), translated and edited by G. Stewart McIntosh (Tayport: Scotland, UK: Mac Research, 1996). 61  Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance and Local Histories/Global Designs; Enrique Dussel, Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” & the Myth of Modernity (New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1995). 62  Lewis U. Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949); Lewis U.  Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1959); Lewis U. Hanke, All Mankind is One; A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974). Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990); Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995).

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recent empires. I myself have scholarly engaged the theological debates that accompanied the emergence of the transatlantic Iberian empire in the sixteenth century.63

God the Liberator Liberation and decolonial theologies have stressed the priority, for its theoretical analysis, of the fate of the poor, the destitute, the “wretched of the earth,” in Franz Fanon’s famous terms, or “the least of these,” in Jesus’ poetic language.64 The downtrodden people who in times of imposed subjugation dramatically exclaim: We know of oppression and torture, We know of extortion and violence, Destitution, disease, The old without fire in winter, The child without milk in summer, Our labour taken away from us, Our sins made heavier upon us. We have seen the young man mutilated, The torn girl trembling by the mill-stream.65

Yet, even in these postmodernist and cybernetic times, people care about God. In the midst of present disturbances and conflicts, the “battle for God,” as Karen Armstrong has named it so aptly,66 rages ferociously. In the fascinating and perplexing kaleidoscope of human social existence, God is reimagined as the ultimate source of hope for the oppressed and downtrodden. When the social miseries that afflict so many communities become unbearable, beyond and besides the tiresome quarrels of religious 63  Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992); Entre el oro y la fe: El dilema de América (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1995). Among theologians, Joerg Rieger is a distinguished exception. He devotes a chapter of one of his books to the critical analysis of Bartolomé de las Casas’ Christology in the context of the sixteenthcentury imperial expansion. Christ & Empire, 159–196. 64  Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, “God the Liberator: Theology, History, and Politics,” in Essays from the Margins (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2014), 63–83. 65  T.  S. Eliot, “Murder in the Cathedral” (1935), in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952), 195. 66  Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God (New York: Knopf, 2000).

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fundamentalism and dogmatic secularism, the memory of God the Liberator erupts again and again: “When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us… we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm” (Deuteronomy 26: 6–8). As the influential 1985 South African Kairos document categorically states: For most of their history from Exodus to Revelation, the people of the Bible suffered under one kind of oppression or another… They were oppressed by the tyrannical, imperial nations around them… The people of Israel were also for many centuries oppressed internally, with their own country, by the rich and the powerful and especially by the kings or rulers of Israel… The Bible, of course, does not only describe oppression, tyranny, and suffering… Throughout the Bible God appears as the liberator of the oppressed.67

These are the factors that counter and resist the ruling imperial project of controlling and policing the frontiers of human imagination. Deeply felt fears and hopes, as David Hume noted more than two centuries ago,68 are able to agitate hearts and spirits and to move minds to think the otherwise unthinkable. Suddenly, at the end of the epoch so aptly named the “Age of Extremes” by Eric Hobsbawm,69 two tendencies clash: the first announces with glib satisfaction “the end of history,” the obliteration of transformative social utopias;70 the second, from the entrails of the ­subordinated subjects,71 proclaims a new insurrection of human hopes for “another possible world.”72 The essential imperative might be to remember and radicalize the prophetic words written by the imprisoned Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a note  Willis H. Logan, ed., The Kairos Covenant: Standing with the South African Christians (New York, NY: Friendship Press, 1988), 27, 33. 68  David Hume, The Natural History of Religion (London: A. & C. Black, 1956). 69  Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994). 70  Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 71  Franz Hinkelammert, El grito del sujeto: del teatro-mundo del evangelio de Juan al perromundo de la globalización (San José, Costa Rica: DEI, 1998). 72  Jorge Pixley et al., Por un mundo otro: alternativas al mercado global (Quito, Ecuador: Consejo Latinoamericano de Iglesias, 2003). 67

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surreptitiously preserved by his friend Eberhard Bethge: “We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled  – in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.”73 This hermeneutical horizon, in constant critical and creative dialogue with contemporary liberation theologies and postcolonial theories, is strikingly analogous to Edward Said’s representation of the intellectual as a person who unearths “the memory of forgotten voices . . . of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless.”74 Its original source is an admonition on countless occasions reiterated by the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, itself: Speak out for those who cannot speak, for the rights of all the destitute. . . defend the rights of the poor and needy. (Proverbs 31:8–9)

73  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge (London: Folio Society, 2000), 16. 74  Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectuals (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 35, 113.

CHAPTER 4

Mesoamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality: Decolonizing Religious Belief Sylvia Marcos

The indigenous women’s movement has started to propose its own “indigenous spirituality.” Documents, declarations, and proposals that were generated at the First Indigenous Women’s Summit of the Americas, as well as at other key meetings that have gathered since, reveal an indigenous spiritual component that differs from the hegemonic influences of the largely Christian, Catholic background of the women’s respective countries. The principles of this indigenous spirituality also depart from the more recent influences of feminist and Latin American ecofeminist liberation theologies. Participants’ discourses, live presentations, and addresses brought to light other expressions of their religious background. Catholicism—as a colonizing enterprise—has deeply permeated the indigenous traditions of the Americas, making it almost impossible to separate “pure” indigenous religious traditions from Catholic images, rites, and symbols. Analyzing writings that stemmed from the 2002 summit allows me to delve deeper into the epistemic characteristics of native religions that set them radically apart from contemporary Christianity, revealing the

S. Marcos (*) Seminario Permanente de Antropologia y Genero at the Institute for Anthropological Research (IIA), Universidad Nacional Autonóma de Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City, Mexico © The Author(s) 2019 R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_4

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initiative and expressions currently emerging from the indigenous women’s movement in the Americas. Drawing on several years of interactions and work with women in Mexico’s indigenous worlds, my intention in this essay is to systematize the principles that have begun to emerge from a distinctive cosmovision and cosmology. Religious references to indigenous spirituality are inspired by ancestral traditions re-created today, as the women struggle for social justice. The inspiration for their social justice activism is often anchored in these beliefs, which stem from ritual, liturgical, and collective worlds of worship that, though often hidden under Catholic Christian imagery, reflect a significant divergence from Christianity, revealing their epistemic particularity. Working, as some authors have suggested, from the “cracks of epistemic differences,” I characterize the indigenous women’s movement as undertaking a “de-colonial” effort.1 These women are actively recapturing ancestral spiritualities in order to decolonize the religious universes they were forced to adopt during the historical colonial enterprise.2 The First Indigenous Women’s Summit of the Americas was a United Nations meeting that took place in December 2002. It was promoted and organized by a collective of indigenous leaders of international reputation, such as Rigoberta Menchú, Myrna Cunningham, Calixta Gabriel, and other regional indigenous women from communities in the Americas.3 1  Walter Mignolo coins these phrases in “From Central Asia to the Caucasus and Anatolia: Transcultural Subjectivity and De-colonial Thinking,” Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 1 (2007): 111–20. 2  Historically, identification with “indigenous” ethnicity, traditions, languages, and attire has elicited elite derision throughout the Americas. The emergence of active indigenous movements all over the Latin American world, however, has opened new spaces for “positive” discrimination. In other words, political and economic spaces now exist that have been reserved for indigenous identities. As a middle-class intellectual and university professor who never suffered the discriminations and offensive behaviors to which the indigenous peoples have been constantly exposed since European conquest and colonial times, my ethical stand is to refrain from either “speaking on behalf” or taking advantage of any preferential treatment now available. It happens sometimes though that I am assimilated to my indigenous friends, and when this is the case, I feel extremely honored. 3  Although Rigoberta Menchú is a controversial figure within the pan-Mayan movement, her initiatives on behalf of indigenous struggles in the Americas are significant. Her strategies are sometimes questionable, but she has undoubtedly become an icon of the capacities of indigenous women to transcend the suffering, limitation, and discrimination that result from not only their gender but also their class and ethnicity. Texts from the summit reveal her Mayan philosophical background and allow us to better understand situations in which her involvement has been criticized. Elsewhere, I explore how feminist theoreticians and/or

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They were joined by Pauline Tiongia, a Maori elder from New Zealand. The meeting hosted approximately four hundred indigenous women representing most countries and many indigenous communities.4 In attendance were women from remote and isolated places, such as the delta of the Orinoco River in Venezuela, where there are no roads, and the Amazon River basin. Prior to the summit, the organizers arranged a series of focus groups designed by the Centro de Estudios e Información de la Mujer Multiétnica from Nicaragua’s indigenous university, the Universidad de las Regiones Autónomas de la Costa Caribe Nicaraguense. The focus groups’ methodology aimed at bringing together indigenous women representatives of the whole region to foster discussions on five main areas of interest: (1) spirituality, education, and culture; (2) gender from the perspective of indigenous women; (3) leadership, empowerment, and indigenous women’s participation; (4) indigenous development and globalization; and (5) human rights and indigenous rights. During the group meetings, women shared their thoughts, perspectives, and experiences concerning spirituality, gender, education, empowerment, development, and their r­ elationships religious scholars have analyzed her contributions. See Sylvia Marcos and Marguerite Waller, eds., Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 5–52. 4  There are numerous definitions of the term indigenous. For example, Linita Manu’atu, writing on Tongan and other Pacific islands peoples, notes that “indigenous refers to the First Peoples who settled in Aotearoa (New Zealand), United States, Canada, and so on.” Maori people refer to themselves as Tangata Whenua: “First Nations or simply the People” (“Katoanga Fiaba: A Pedagogical Site for Tongan Students,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 32, no. 1 [2000]: 7–80, quotations on 80). According to Kay Warren and Jean Jackson, writing in their introduction to Indigenous Movements, Self-representation, and the State in Latin America ([Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002], 11), “indigenous . . . is itself, of course, a historical product of European colonialism that masks enormous variations in history, culture, community, and relations with those who are considered non-indigenous.” According to the United Nations, “indigenous communities, peoples, and nations are those groups who have a continuous history that originates from earlier stages to the presence of the invasion and colonization. Groups that develop in their territories or part of it, and consider themselves different to other sectors of the society that are now dominant. These groups are today subaltern sectors and they are decided to preserve, develop, and transmit to the future generations their ancestral territories and their ethnic identity. These characteristics are fundamental to their existential continuity as peoples, in relationship with their own cultural, social, institutional, and legal systems” (“Movimientos étnicos y legislación internacional,” Doc. UN, ICN.41 Sub.2/1989/33 Add. 3 paragraph 4, in Rincones de Coyoacan 5 [February–March 1994], Convention n. 169 of the ILO of United Nations).

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to international funding and cooperation agencies. These discussions, which were transcribed and lightly edited, constituted the basic documents for the summit meeting. The importance of research being both led and designed by the same subjects (objects) of research inquiry cannot be overemphasized. Asymmetrical power relations between urban women and indigenous peasant women are evident throughout the Latin American continent. Urban woman have access to higher education, professional positions, and economic resources, and usually they are whose voices, proposals, and projects for research and support. The summit, however, selected its participants from a pool of strong indigenous women who were already functioning in leadership roles: senators, regidoras, congresswomen, heads of social organizations, and leaders of political grassroots groups. All these women had many years of experience exercising political and social influence and leadership. The summit offered them a space where they could express their experiences and priorities in their own voices, without the mediations and interpretations of the area’s elite and hegemonic institutions. As I mentioned, one of the main themes of the summit was “gender from the indigenous women’s vision,” a much-debated issue that has sometimes created barriers between mainstream feminism and the indigenous women’s movement. I had the privilege of being invited to be one of the few “non-indigenous” women participants at the meeting and to serve as a consultant for their gender and empowerment documents. The organizers knew of my research on early Mesoamerican cosmology and activist work and expressed the desire to hear the opinion of a feminist who has respect for indigenous cultures. The theme of indigenous spirituality was transversal, intersecting with every other issue addressed at the summit. It was so prominent that a study of summit documents, voted on by consensus, reveals the priorities of the contemporary struggles, concerns, and agendas of indigenous groups in the Americas. The documents set indigenous spirituality as an origin and a motor for the re-creation of collectivities and for the emergence of a new pan-indigenous, collective subject in which women’s leadership is emerging and potentially growing, defining the women as outspoken, strong, and clear agents for change. As recently as a few years ago, the term indigenous women was a pejorative that indigenous peoples themselves had never used to name a self-­ constituted identity. Now, indigenous women denote a collective subjectivity, a social actor that indigenous women themselves have created

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through their political and spiritual practices. As workshop leader and consultant to indigenous women’s organizations from several ethnic groups of Mexico and Latin America, I have witnessed their ties, their collective identification, and the strength of their spiritual and cosmological references.

The Modernity of Ancient Spirituality The Latin American continent has long been known as a stronghold of Catholicism. Even today, the Vatican counts Latin America as one of the regions boasting the greatest numbers of Catholics in the world.5 Among indigenous social movements, claiming the right to develop and define their own spirituality is a novel attitude, yet one that indigenous people voice with increasing intensity.6 Beyond claiming a right to food and shelter, a decent livelihood, and ownership of their territory and its resources, the indigenous are turning an internal gaze toward their traditional culture. They are also daring to question the most ingrained sequels of Catholic colonization and rejecting the contempt and disdain with which the Catholic majority views their spirituality, beliefs, and practices. An example of the mainstream Catholic perspective toward the indigenous peoples appears in the “Message of the Bishops to the Summit” below. Despite conflicting perspectives held by scholars and other commentators, indigenous social movements are the most visible transformational force in the Latin American continent.7 Indigenous peoples no longer accept the image that was imposed on them from the exterior. They want to create their own identity; they refuse to be museum objects. It is not a question of reviving the past. Indigenous cultures are alive, and the only way for them to survive is to reinvent themselves, re-creating their identity

5  During the past 20 years, the Catholic population has been decreasing consistently. Today in Mexico, roughly 82 percent of the population identifies as Catholic in contrast to 96.5 percent two decades ago. Among the impoverished and dispossessed of Mexico are many Catholics, among whom stand 62 distinct indigenous groups in the country. 6  This theme resounds around the world with other indigenous peoples. See the Maori claims in Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Books, 1999). 7  José Gil Olmos, interview with Alain Touraine, “Mexico en riesgo de caer en el caos y caci-quismo,” La Jornada, November 6, 2000, 3.

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while maintaining their differences.8 Anthropologist Kay Warren offers insights into the genealogy of the pan-indigenous collective subject. What Warren calls the “pan-Mayan collective identity” was forged out of the peoples’ need to survive the aggressions of the state in Guatemala. As distinct ethnic groups were threatened with cultural annihilation, their guides, philosopher-leaders, formulated a collective identity drawn from their inherited oral, mythic, and religious traditions. As Warren explains, the bearers of cultural wisdom began to set forth an “assertion of a common past which has been suppressed and fragmented by European colonialism and the emergence of modern liberal states. In this view, cultural revitalization reunites the past with the present as a political force.”9 Whatever the possible explanations for the genesis of this pan-indigenous collective social subject might be, it engenders a political collectivity, and one of its central claims is often based on its own self-defined “indigenous spirituality.” Indigenous women are claiming this ancestral wisdom, cosmovision, and spirituality, but theirs is a selective process and they are contesting issues within tradition that constrain or hamper their space as women. Meanwhile, those who have an enhanced position as women within their spiritual ancestral communities are held onto dearly, with the community ensuring their survival. Addressing the Mexican Congress in March 2002, Comandanta Esther, a Zapatista leader from the southern state of Chiapas, expressed the concern of indigenous women in this way: “I want to explain the situation of women as we live it in our communities, . . . as girls they think we are not valuable . . . as women mistreated . . . also women have to carry water, walking two to three hours holding a vessel and a child in their arms.” After speaking of her daily sufferings under indigenous customary law, she added: “I am not telling you this so you pity us. We have struggled to change this and we will continue doing it.”10 Comandanta Esther was expressing the inevitable struggle for change that indigenous women face, while also demanding respect for their agency. They—those directly involved—have to lead the process of change. There is no need for pity and still less for instructions from outsiders on how to defend their rights 8  José Gil Olmos, interview with Yvon Le Bot, “Moderno y creativo el movimiento de indígenas en América Latina,” La Jornada, March 26, 2000, 3. 9  Warren and Jackson, Indigenous Movements, 11. 10  Quoted in Sylvia Marcos, “The Borders Within: The Indigenous Women’s Movement and Feminism in Mexico,” in Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization, ed. Sylvia Marcos and Marguerite Waller (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 81–113, esp. 103.

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as women. This would be another form of imposition, however well meant it might be. Comandanta Esther’s discourse should convince those intellectuals removed from the daily life of indigenous peoples that culture is not monolithic, not static. “We want recognition for our way of dressing, of talking, of governing, of organizing, of praying, of working collectively, of respecting the earth, of understanding nature as something we are part of.”11 In consonance with many indigenous women who have raised their voices in recent years, she wants both to transform and to preserve her culture. This is the background of the demands for social justice indigenous women express, against which we must view the declarations and claims for indigenous spirituality that emerged from the First Indigenous Women’s Summit of the Americas. Among the thematic resolutions proposed and passed by consensus at the summit, the following is particularly emblematic: We re-evaluate spirituality as the main axis of culture. (Memoria 61)12 The participants of the First Indigenous Women Summit of the Americas resolve: that spirituality is an indivisible part of the community. It is a cosmic vision of life shared by everyone and wherein all beings are interrelated and complementary in their existence. Spirituality is a search for the equilibrium and harmony within ourselves as well as the other surrounding beings. (Memoria 60)13

 Ibid.  “Revaloramos la espiritualidad como el eje principal de la cultura.” Memoria de la Primera Cumbre de Mujeres Indígenas de América (Mexico: Fundación Rigoberto Menchú Tum, 2003), 32. Quotations from the Memoria, the raw materials and transcriptions from focus groups, and documents from the summit vary in translation. Some of the documents are translated into English as part of the document, in which case the Spanish translation of a particular section has a different page number from the English. In some cases, the Spanish was not translated in the documents; this is particularly the case for the position statements, whereas the declarations and plans of actions are often in both Spanish and English in the documents. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. All future references to the Memoria are made parenthetically in the text. 13  “Las participantes de la Primera Cumbre de Mujeres Indígenas de America consideramos: que la espiritualidad está ligada al sentido comunitario de la visión cósmica de la vida, donde los seres se interrelacionan y se complementan en su existencia. Que la espiritualidad es la búsqueda del equilibrio y la armonia con nosotros mismos y con los demás” (Memoria 31). 11 12

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We demand of different churches and religions to respect the beliefs and cultures of Indigenous peoples without imposing on us any religious practice that conflicts with our spirituality. (Memoria 19)14

What Does Indigenous Spirituality Mean? When I first approached the documents of the summit, I was surprised by their frequent use of the self-elected term spirituality. Its meaning in this context is by no means self-evident, and has little to do with what the word usually represents in the Christian traditions, in which I include all denominations. When the indigenous women use the word spirituality, they give it a meaning that clearly sets it apart from Catholic and other Christian traditions that arrived in the Americas at the time of the conquest and the ensuing colonization: “We indigenous Mexican women . . . take our decision to practice freely our spirituality that is different from a religion but in the same manner we respect everyone else’s beliefs.”15 This stance is strongly influenced by an approach that espouses transnational sociopolitical practices. Indigenous movements and, in particular, the women in them are being increasingly exposed to a globalizing world. The presence of a Maori elder at the summit, as well as the frequent participation of Mexican indigenous women in indigenous peoples’ meetings around the world, have favored new attitudes of openness, understanding, and coalition beyond their own traditional cultural boundaries. Through the lens of indigenous spirituality, we can glimpse the cosmovision that pervades the worlds of indigenous women.

14  “Demandamos de las diferentes iglesias y religions respetar las creencias y culturas de los Pueblos Indígenas sin imponernos ninguna practica religiosa que contravenga nuestra espiritualidad.” 15  “Las mujeres indígenas mexicanas . . . tomamos nuestras decisiones para ejercer libremente nuestra espiritualidad que es diferente a una religión y de igual manera se respeta la creencia de cada quien.” Mensaje de las Mujeres Indígenas Mexicanas a los Monseñores de la Comisión Espiscopal de Obispos, December 1–2, 2002, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1, copy in author’s possession.

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The Bishops’ Message at the Summit and the Women’s Response Reports about the summit’s preparatory sessions, combined with the public status of its main organizer, indigenous Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú, gained the attention of the Mexican bishops. They apparently feared that the indigenous worlds, which they regard as part of their domain, were getting out of control. Worse, indigenous women were taking the lead and gaining a public presence. Rumors that reproductive rights were being discussed on the summit’s agenda also sparked concern among the bishops, and Catholic authorities spoke out against indigenous agitation. They felt pressed to send a “message” and a warning, noting that “the Summit touches on indigenous peoples’ spirituality, education and culture from perspectives such as traditional knowledge, loss and re-­ construction of collective and individual identities, and also from indigenous women’s spirituality from a perspective totally distant from the cultural and spiritual reality of the diverse ethnic groups that form our [sic] indigenous peoples.”16 This patronizing and discriminatory message was sent to the summit by the Episcopal Commission for Indigenous (Comisión Episcopal de Indígenas). Paternalistic throughout, the tone of the message is one of admonition and condescension toward the indigenous “subject.” It assumes that rationality and truth are the private domain of bishops. They feel it is their obligation to lead their immature indigenous women subjects, that is, to teach them, guide them, and scold them when they think they are wrong. The reader gets the sense that, to the bishops, this collectivity of women is dangerously straying from the indigenous peoples as the bishops define them.

16  “La Cumbre aborda la espiritualidad, la educación y la cultura de los pueblos indígenas desde conceptos de conocimiento tradicional, perdida y reconstrucción de identidad individual y colectiva, asi como espiritualidad de la mujer indígena, desde una perspectiva completa\mente ale- jada de la realidad cultural y espiritual de las diferentes etnias que forman nuestros [sic] pueblos indígenas.” Hector Gonzalez, Archbishop of Oaxaca; Sergio Obeso, Archbishop of Jalapa, Veracruz; Lazaro Perez, Bishop of Autlán, Jalisco; and Rodrigo Aguilar, Bishop of Matehuala, San Luis Potosí, Mensaje a la Cumbre de Mujeres Indigenas de las Ameritas Comisión Episcopal de Indígenas, Oaxaca, México, December 2002, Ms. 1–4, p.  2, copy in author’s possession, emphasis added (hereafter cited as “Bishops’ Message”).

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The indigenous women’s response (Mensaje de las Mujeres Indígenas Mexicanas a los Monseñores de la Comisión Episcopal de Indígenas) emerged from a collective meeting. In this document, the 38 representatives of Mexican indigenous communities expressed their plight in the following words17: “Now we can manifest openly our spirituality. Our ancestors were obliged to hide it. . . . It is evident that evangelization was an imposition and that on top of our temples and ceremonial centers churches were built.”18 They continued, declaring that “we Mexican Indigenous women are adults and we take over our right to practice freely our spirituality that is different from a religion . . . we feel that we have the right to our religiosity as indigenous peoples.”19 Additionally, they were determined to “reconfirm the principles that inspire us to recover and strengthen reciprocity, complementarity, duality, to regain equilibrium,” but reassured the bishops, “do not worry, we are analyzing them [the customary law practices that could hamper human rights], because we believe that the light of reason and justice also illuminates us, and certain things should not be permitted.”20 This last sentence makes a veiled reference to centuries of colonial and postcolonial oppression. First the colonizers and then the modern state, both with Church approval, denied indigenous peoples the qualification of gente de razón (people with the capacity of reason). Even today, in some parts of Mexico, this qualification is reserved for whites and mestizos.

17  The document was produced collectively after hours of proposals and debate. It was finally agreed on by a consensus vote, the only way to be truly “democratic” among indigenous peoples. 18  “Ciertamente hoy podemos manifestar mas plenamente nuestra espiritualidad, lo que no pudieron hacer nuestros antepasados porque lo hicieron a escondidas. . . . Para nadie es oculto de la imposición de la evangelización y que sobre la espiritualidad y centros ceremoniales se fundaron las iglesias en nuestros Pueblos” (Mensaje de las Mujeres Indígenas Mexicanas, 1). 19  “Las mujeres indígenas mexicanas somos mayores de edad y tomamos nuestras decisiones para ejercer libremente nuestra espiritualidad que es diferente a una religion . . . nos sentimos con derecho a ejercer . . . nuestra religiosidad como pueblos indígenas” (ibid., 1–2). 20  “Recon rmamos nuestros principios que nos inspiran a recuperar y fortalecer . . . la reciprocidad, complementariedad, dualidad para recuperar el equilibrio”; “No se preocupen, las estamos analizando [los usos y costumbres que atentan contra la dignidad y los derechos humanos], porque también creemos que nos ilumina la luz de la razón y la justicia” (ibid., 1).

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As a voluntary, “only listening” participant of this collectivity of 38 mujeres indígenas mexicanas, I paid careful attention to all the discussions. These speakers of several indigenous languages groped for an adequate Spanish wording to convey the ideas sustaining their formal response to the monolingual bishops. At one point, when asked directly what I thought about the use of a particular term, I ventured an opinion. After they discussed it, they decided not to go with my suggestion. The significance here is that my opinion was treated not as authoritative but simply equally worthy of consideration. To them, I was a supportive “non-­ indigenous” feminist. Fortunately, long gone were the days when an urban mestizo university woman could impose an idea or even a word. The women’s discussions were horizontally collective. Women there represented the majority of the Mexican ethnic communities. Their native languages included Nahuatl, Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Chol, Zapotec, Mixe, Mazatec, Mixtec, and Purepecha, among others. The gathering was an expression of the new collective subject that is taking the lead in struggles for social justice. Notwithstanding traditional ethnic divides among them, all the women involved chose to emphasize their commonalities and identify themselves as Mexican indigenous women. Despite some language barriers, their discussions of ideas and words have stayed with me. They struggled with Spanish as they forged the language of their text. Editing the document took all of us into the early hours of the next day. It was finally passed by consensus, in which my vote as “non-indigenous” counted as any other, as it should in a consensus-building process. In addition to the constraints posed by the multiplicity of their languages, women at the summit expressed the deeply pressing dilemma of having to deal with a religious institution that, in spite of its evangelical roots, has traditionally been misogynistic, as well as, for the most part, culturally and ethnically prejudiced against indigenous worlds. The women’s insistence that they are adults (“las mujeres indígenas mexicanas somos mayores de edad”) is a response to the assumption implicit in the Bishops’ Message, namely, that not only women but also indigenous peoples in general are minors and, as such, in need of strict guidance and reprimand. The ecclesiastical message also implies that the (male) bishops and archbishops know better than the (female) indigenous social activists themselves what it means to be indigenous in contemporary Mexico. Considering the cautious reverence paid to Catholic authorities by most Mexicans—whether they are believers or not—the indigenous women’s response is a significant expression of a newly gained spirit of a­ utonomy

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and self- determination. The women’s declaration, in both tone and content, also speaks to the erosion of the Church’s dominion over indigenous worlds. These poor, unschooled women have shown themselves to be braver and less submissive than some feminist negotiators at a recent United Nations meeting with Vatican representatives.21

Decolonizing Epistemology Several authors have argued that decolonizing efforts should be grounded at the epistemological level.22 When speaking of the future of feminism, Judith Butler recommends a “privileging of epistemology” as an urgent next step in our commitments. She also reminds us that “there is no register for ‘audibility’ referring to the difficulties of reaching out, understanding, and respecting ‘Other’ subaltern epistemic worlds.”23 The following analysis of some basic characteristics of indigenous spirituality is an invitation to understand it in its own terms. It is an effort toward widening the “register for audibility,” so the voices and positions of the indigenous may bypass the opaque lenses of philosophical ethnocentricity. This deepening of understanding will facilitate a less domineering and imposing relationship with women not only in society and politics but also in the spiritual indigenous domains. As Maria Estela Jocón, an indigenous woman from Moloj Mayib’, a political Mayan women’s organization, complained regarding her encounter with feminists, “they question us very much, they insist that we should question our culture . . . what we do not accept is their imposition, that they tell us what we have to do, when we have the power to decide by ourselves. (I do not mean) . . . that the feminist comes and shares tools with us and we are able to do 21  During several UN meetings of the reproductive rights network here in Mexico and in New  York, I consistently noticed that many feminist activists, journalists, and academic researchers, though not necessarily Catholic believers, manifested a mix of fear and respectful reverence when in proximity of ecclesiastical garments and other paraphernalia of church officials, which prevented them from effectively negotiating with the Vatican representatives, despite their deep ingrained anti-religious stand. 22  Mignolo, “From Central Asia to the Caucasus and Anatolia”; Madina Tlostanova, “Why Cut the Feet in Order to Fit the Western Shoes?: Non-European Soviet Ex-colonies and the Modern Colonial Gender System,” Ms. (Moscow) (2007); and Marcos, “The Borders Within.” 23  Judith Butler, “Conversation between Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Judith Butler,” paper presented at the Area Studies/Literary Fields/Multilinguism/Theory conference, New York University, 2004.

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it: that she could support me, that she can walk by my side . . . but she should not impose on me. This is what many feminist women have done, be imposing” (Memoria, 274–75).24 The opinion of this indigenous woman is confirmed by Gayatri Spivak’s critique of “the international feminist tendency to matronize the Southern woman as belonging to gender oppressive second-class cultures.”25 A de-colonial thinking grounded in another epistemological stand is required.

A World Constructed by Fluid Dual Oppositions, Beyond Mutually Exclusive Categories To be able to comprehend contemporary indigenous spirituality, it is important to review some of the tenets of Mesoamerican ancestral “embodied thought.”26 Duality is the centerpiece of spirituality understood as a cosmic vision of life. Duality—not dualism—is a pervasive perception in indigenous thought and spirituality. The pervasiveness of a perception without equivalent in Western thought could, perhaps, largely explain the persistent barrier to penetrating and comprehending indigenous worlds. According to Mesoamerican cosmology, the dual unity of the feminine and masculine is fundamental to the creation of the cosmos, as well as its (re)generation, and sustenance. The fusion of feminine and masculine in one bipolar principle is a recurring feature of almost every Mesoamerican community today. Divinities themselves are gendered feminine and masculine. There is no concept of a virile god (e.g., the image of a white-bearded man as the Christian God has sometimes been represented) but rather a mother/father dual protector/creator. In Nahua culture, this dual god/goddess is called Ometeotl, from ome, “two,” and teotl, “god.” Yet Ometeotl does not mean “two gods” but rather “god Two” or, better, “divinity of Duality.” The name results from the fusion of

24  “Ellas cuestionan mucho el hecho de que tienes que cuestionar tu cultura. Lo que no nos gusta es la imposición, que te digan lo que tienes que hacer, cuando tu tienes el poder de decidir sobre ti. No es que la otra . . . feminista venga y me de las herramientas para hacerlo: que me puede ayudar, que puede caminar conmigo, . . . pero que no me imponga. Eso es lo que tal vez muchas mujeres feministas han hecho, imponer.” 25  Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 999), 407. 26  Sylvia Marcos, “Embodied Religious Thought: Gender Categories in Mesoamerica,” Religion 28 (998): 7–82.

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Omecihuatl (cihuatl meaning woman or lady) and Ometecuhtli (tecuhtli, man or lord), that is, of the Lady and of the Lord of Duality. The protecting Ometeotl has to be alternately placated and sustained. Like all divine beings, it was not conceived as purely beneficial. Rather, it oscillated—like all other dualities—between opposite poles and thus could be supportive or destructive. In addition, a multiplicity of goddesses and gods entered into diverse relations of reciprocity with the people. Elsewhere, I have dealt more comprehensively with the gods and goddesses of the Mesoamerican cosmovision.27 Scholars recognize that the religiosity of the entire Mesoamerican region is pregnant with similar symbolic meanings, rituals, and myths concerning the condition of the supernatural beings, the place of humans in the cosmos. One of our most eminent ethnohistorians, Alfredo Lopez Austin, refers to this commonality of perceptions, conceptions, and forms of action as the núcleo duro, the “hard core” of Mesoamerican cultures.28 Duality, defined as a complementary duality of opposites, is the essential ordering force of the universe and is also reflected in the ordering of time. Time is marked by two calendars, one ritual based and the other astronomical. The ritual calendar is linked to the human gestational cycle. The other is an agricultural calendar that prescribes the periods for seeding, sowing, and planting corn. Maize (corn) is conceived of as the earthly matter from which all beings in the universe are made.29 Human gestation and agricultural cycles are understood within this concept of time-duality, as are feminine and masculine, but dualities extend far beyond these spheres. For instance, life and death, above and below, light and dark, and beneficence and malevolence are considered dual aspects of the same reality. Neither pole invalidates the other. Both are in constant mutual interaction, flowing into each other. Mutually exclusive categories are not part of the epistemic background of this worldview, whose plasticity is still reflected in the ways indigenous women deal with life and conflict. They seldom remain mired in a position that would deny the opposite. Their philosophical background allows them both to resist impositions and to appropriate modern elements into their spirituality. Fluidity and selectivity 27  Sylvia Marcos, Taken from the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerica (Leiden: Brill, 2006). 28  Alfredo Lopez Austin, “El núcleo duro, la cosmovisión y la tradición mesoamericana,” in Cosmovisión, Ritual e Identidad de los Pueblos Indígenas de Mexico, ed. Johanna Broda y Felix Baez-Jorge (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 200q), 47–65. 29  Marcos, Taken from the Lips.

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in adopting novel attitudes and values speak of the ongoing reconfiguration of their world of reference. The principle of fluid duality has held indigenous worlds together over the centuries. It has been both concealed and protected by its nonintelligibility to outsiders, and it has guarded this “subaltern Other” from inimical incursions into their native philosophical depths. The “hard core” of indigenous cultures has been a well-kept secret. Even today, among many native communities in the Americas, exposing this concealed background to outsiders is considered a community betrayal.30 Only recently have indigenous women themselves started the process of unveiling. From my position as an outsider, I felt pressed to seek permission of Nubia, a Tepoztlán Nahua indigenous leader, whether I could interview her about her beliefs, conception of duality, and ritual in the ceremonies of her village. She accepted but did not allow me to ask questions without her explicit previous agreement. Presently, some indigenous women and men are becoming vocal carriers of their religious and philosophical heritage and have agreed to vocalize their heritage, to share it with the outside world. The people incarnating living indigenous traditions have played almost no part in the formation of academic theories. They were rarely consulted, but neither did they care to validate or invalidate the views of the so-called experts who had officially “defined” their worlds. Silence was their weapon of survival. Only recently have they learned to use, critically and autonomously, whatever knowledge has been collected about them. The women explained that they want to “systematize the oral traditions of our peoples through the elders’ knowledge and practices” (Memoria 62).31

Duality and Gender In the indigenous Mesoamerican world, gender is constructed within the pervasive concept of duality.32 Gender, that is, the masculine/feminine duality, is the root metaphor for the whole cosmos. Everything is identified as either feminine or masculine, and this applies to natural phenomena 30  Inés Talamantes, a Native American professor of Religious Studies who does ethnography on her own Mescalero Apache culture, once confided to me that she was forbidden by her community to reveal the deep meanings of their ceremonies. 31  “Sistematizar la tradición oral de nuestros Pueblos a traves de los conocimientos y practicas de nuestros ancianos y ancianas” (Memoria 33). 32  Marcos, “Embodied Religious Thought,” and Marcos, Taken from the Lips.

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such as rain, hail, lightning, and clouds; living beings, such as animals, plants, and humans; and even to periods of time, such as days, months, and years.33 All these entities have a feminine or masculine “breath” or “weight.” It is evident, then, that this perception of gender corresponds to a duality of complementary opposites, a duality, in turn, that is the fabric of the cosmos. Duality is the linking and ordering force that creates a coherent reference for indigenous peoples, the knitting thread that weaves together all apparent disparities.34 The documents from the summit foreground and help explain the concept that duality is also a basic referent of indigenous spirituality: To speak of the gender concept presupposes the concept of duality emerging from the indigenous cosmovision . . . the whole universe is ruled by duality: the sky and earth, night and day, sadness and happiness, they complement each other. The one cannot exist without the other. (Summit Doc. Género 6) Everything is ruled by the concept of duality, certainly, men and women. (Memoria 231)35 Duality is something we live through, it is there . . . we learn of it within our spirituality and we live it in ceremonies, we live it when we see that in our

33  Alfredo Lopez Austin, The Human Body and Ideology (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 988). 34  See, for example, Noemí Quezada, Sexualidad Amor y Erotismo: México préhispanico y México Colonial (México: IIA–Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México y Plaza Valdez, 1997); and Sylvia Marcos, “La construcción del género en Mesoamerica: Un reto Epistemológico,” paper presented at the 13th Congreso Internacional de Ciencias Antropológicas y Etnológicas, Mexico, August 4, 1993. 35  “Hablar del concepto de género supone remitirse al concepto de dualidad manejado desde la cosmovisión indígena . . . ya que todo el universo se rige en términos de dualidad: el cielo y la tierra, la noche y el día, la tristeza y la felicidad, se complementan el uno al otro.” Documento “Género desde la Visión de las Mujeres Indígenas,” Universidad de las Regiones Autónomas de la Costa Caribe Nicaragüense, URACCAN, Centro de estudios e Información de la mujer multiétnica CEIMM, Documento Primera Cumbre Internacional de Mujeres Indígenas, 2002, Ms. –4, 6 (hereafter cited in text as Summit Doc. Género), copy in author’s possession; and “Todo se rige en términos de Dualidad, indudablemente, el hombre y la mujer” (Memoria 231).

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families women and men, mother and father take the decisions. (Summit Doc. Género 6)36

Yet, despite the reverential espousal of the ancestral concept of gender duality and complementarity, contemporary indigenous women express some reticence and even rejection of some aspects of it. Their arguments are based on how it is lived today in many indigenous communities. For example, in the summit document dedicated to “Gender from the Vision of Indigenous Women,” Maria Estela Jocón, a Mayan Guatemalan wise woman, remarks that duality today “is something we should question, it is a big question mark, because as theory it is present in our cosmovision and in our customary laws, as theory, but in practice you see many situations where only the man decides . . . mass media, schools, and many other issues have influenced this principle of Duality so it is a bit shaky now” (Summit Doc. Género 7).37 Alma Lopez, a young indigenous self-identified feminist, who is a regidora in her community, believes that the concept of duality of complementary opposites has been lost, noting that “the philosophical principles that I would recover from my culture would be equity, and complementarity between women and men, women and women, and between men and men. Today the controversial complementarity of Mayan culture does not exist.”38 However, beyond the reticence or even outright negations of the contemporary and lived practices of inherited philosophical principles, indigenous women are still claiming them, still want to be inspired by them, and propose to reinscribe them in their contemporary struggles for gender 36  “La dualidad es algo que se vive, que se da . . . nos la enseñan en la espiritualidad y lo vivimos en la ceremonia, lo vivimos cuando vemos familias en las que las mujeres y los hombres, el papa y la mama deciden” (Candida Jimenez, Mixe indigenous woman, Summit Doc. Género 6). 37  “La Dualidad hoy en dia es cuestionante, es un signo de interrogación grandisimo, porque como teoría existe en nuestra cosmovisión y en nuestras costumbres, como teoría, pero en la practica se ven muchas situaciones donde solamente el hombre decide. . . . Los medios de comunicación, la escuela y muchos otros elementos han in uido para que ese principio de la Dualidad esté un poquito tambaleant.” 38  “Los principios losó cos que yo recuperaría de mi cultura son la equidad, la complementariedad entre hombres y mujeres, entre mujeres y mujeres, entre hombres y hombres. . . . Actualmente esa famosa complementariedad de la cultura maya no existe.” Quoted in Bastian Duarte and Angela Ixkic, “Conversación con Alma Lopez, Autoridad Guatemalteca: La Doble Mirada del Género y la Etnicidad,” in Estudios Latinoamericanos, nueva epoca, 9, no. 8 (2002): 76–82, quotation on 78.

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justice. They deem it necessary not only to recapture their ancestral cultural roots and beliefs but also to think of them as a potent resource in their quest for gender justice and equity. As another summit document explains, “Today, there are big differences between the condition of women in relation to that of men. This does not mean that it was always like this. In this case there is the possibility of returning to our roots and recovering the space that is due to women, based on indigenous cosmovision” (Memoria 133).39 The summit document dedicated to gender has the subtitle De los aportes de las mujeres indígenas al feminismo (indigenous women’s contributions to feminism). In this portion of the document, too, the women cast off their role as recipients of a feminism imposed on them by outside forces and instead proclaim that their feminist vision has contributions to offer to other feminist approaches. Among their contributions to feminism are the innovative concepts of parity, duality, and equilibrium. The first paragraph explains that “some key aspects from indigenous movements have to be emphasized. They are the concepts of duality, equilibrium, and harmony with all the implications we have mentioned already” (Summit Doc. Género 31).40 It also proposes, “to all indigenous peoples and women’s movements a revision of cultural patterns . . . with the objective of propitiating gender relations based on equilibrium” (Summit Doc. Género 37).41 Duality, equilibrium, and harmony are among the basic principles of their feminist practices. Indigenous women claim that the demands for equality by the other feminist movements could better be interpreted within their spirituality and cosmovision as a search for equilibrium.

39  “En la actualidad existen grandes diferencias entre la situación de la mujer con relación a la del hombre, no significa que siempre fue así, en este caso existe al posibilidad de retomar las raíces y recuperar el espacio que le corresponde a la mujer basado en la cosmovisión indígena.” 40  “Puntualizar algunos visiones de equilibrio, dualidad y armonia, con todas las implicaciones anteriormente citadas.” 41  “A todos los Pueblos Indigenas y movimientos de mujeres indígenas, revisión de los patrones culturales con capacidad autocrítica, con el n de propiciar unas relaciones de género basadas en el equilibrio.”

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Equilibrium as Gender Equity Equilibrium, as conceived in indigenous spirituality, is not the static repose of two equal weights or masses. Rather, it is a force that constantly modifies the relation between dual or opposite pairs. Like duality itself, equilibrium, or balance, permeates not only relations between men and women but also relations among deities, between deities and humans, and among elements of nature. The constant search for this balance was vital to the preservation of order in every area, from daily life to the activity of the cosmos. Equilibrium is as fundamental as duality itself. Duality, thus, is not a binary ordering of “static poles.” Balance in this view can best be understood as an agent that constantly modifies the terms of dualities and thereby bestows a singular quality on the complementary pairs of opposites that permeate all indigenous thought (as seen in the summit documents and declarations). Equilibrium is constantly reestablishing its own balance. It endows duality with a flexibility or plasticity that makes it flow, impeding stratification. There is not an exclusively feminine or exclusively masculine being. Rather, beings possess these forces in different nuances or combinations. The imperceptible “load” or “charge” that all beings have—whether rocks, animals, or people—is feminine or masculine. Frequently, entities possess both feminine and masculine capacities simultaneously in different gradations that perpetually change and shift.42 The gender documents created at the summit were direct transcriptions from the focus group discussions. The following rich and spontaneous evaluations of equilibrium express the indigenous manner of conceiving gender equity: We understand the practice of gender perspective to be a respectful relationship . . . of balance, of equilibrium—what in the Western world would be equity. (Summit Doc. Género 6)43

 Lopez Austin, Human Body and Ideology.  “Se entiende así la practica de enfoque de género como una relación respetuosa, . . . de balance, de equilibrio-lo que en occidente sería de equidad.” 42 43

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Equilibrium means taking care of life . . . when community values of our environment and social community are respected, there is equilibrium. (Memoria 132)44 Between one extreme and the other there is a center. The extremes and their center are not absolute, but depend on a multiplicity of factors . . . variable and not at all exact. . . . [Duality] is equilibrium at its maximum expression. (Memoria 231)45

Indigenous women refer to equilibrium as the attainable ideal for the whole cosmos, and as the best way to express their own views on gender equity.

The Spirituality of Immanence In the fluid, dual universe of indigenous spiritualities, the sacred domain is pervasive. Strong continuities exist between the natural and supernatural worlds, whose sacred beings are interconnected closely with humans, who in turn propitiate this interdependence in all their activities. Enacting this principle, at the summit, every single activity started with an embodied ritual. The women from Latin American indigenous communities wake up early in the morning. I had a room on the second floor, directly above the room of Rigoberta Menchú. The sounds of the early morning sacred ritual were a reminder that I was moving, for those days, in an indigenous universe. Processions and chants were led by a couple of Mayan ritual specialists: a woman and a man. We prayed and walked through the gardens and premises of our fancy four-star hotel, which had never before been taken over by the indigenous world. Nothing ever started, at this United Nations protocol, without rhythmic sounds and chants, offerings to the four corners of the world, of “copal” (a sort of Mexican incense), and colored candles. The sacred indigenous world was there present with us; we could feel it. It was alive in the atmosphere and within each of the participants. It lived in the flowers and fruits, and in the rhythmic repetition of words.

44  “El equilibrio es velar por la vida. . . . Cuando los valores de la comunidad, de nuestro medio social y de nuestro entorno son respetados hay equilibrio.” 45  “Entre extremo y extremo se encuentra el centro. Los extremos de la escala, asi como su centro, no son cualidades absolutas, sino dependen de multitud de factores . . . variables y en absoluto exactos . . . [la Dualidad] es el equilibrio, en su maxima expresión.”

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In striking contrast with indigenous spirituality, the dominant tradition in Christian theology stresses “classical theism,” defined as centered on a metaphysical concept of God as ontologically transcendent and independent from the world. This concept of God has met with increasing criticism, particularly among ecofeminists and process theologians.46 In indigenous spirituality, the relationship to the supernatural world lies elsewhere: The cosmic vision of life is to be connected with the surroundings, and all the surroundings have life, so they become SACRED: we encounter earth, mountains, valleys, caves, plants, animals, stones, water, air, moon, sun, stars. Spirituality is born from this perspective and conception in which all beings that exist in Mother Nature have life and are interrelated. Spirituality is linked to a sense of COMMUNITY in which all beings are interrelated and complementary. (Memoria 28)47

Ivone Gevara, a Brazilian ecofeminist theologian, recalls how an Aymara indigenous woman responded to Gevara’s theological perspective: “With eco-feminism I am not ashamed anymore of expressing beliefs from my own culture. I do not need to emphasize that they have Christian elements for them to be considered good . . . they simply are valuable.”48 Ecofeminist theology promotes complex and novel positions centered on a respect for earth and reverence for nature. Many indigenous women perceive this feminist theology to be easier to understand and closer to the standpoint of their indigenous spirituality than Catholic theism. These bridges between Christian and indigenous spiritualities become more intelligible when we reflect on the main characteristics that shape indigenous spirituality’s relationship to nature: its divine dimensions, the personification of deities in humans, the fluidity between immanent and 46  Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (1986; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); and Ivone Gevara, “Epistemologia Ecofeminista,” in Ecofeminismo: Tendencias e Debates (Mandragora, Sao Bernardo do Campo: Universidad de Metodista de Sao Paulo, 2001), 8–27. 47  “La visión cósmica de la vida es estar conectado con el entorno y todo los que hay en el entorno tiene vida, por lo que adquiere un valor SAGRADO: encontramos tierra cerros, planicies, cuevas, plantas, animales, piedras, agua, aire, luna, sol, estrellas. La espiritualidad nace de esta visión y concepción en la que todos los seres que hay en la Madre Naturaleza tienen vida y se interrelacionan. La espiritualidad está ligada al sentido comunitario, donde los seres se interrelacionan y se complementan.” 48  Quoted in Gevara, “Epistemologia Ecofeminista,” 21.

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transcendent, and the fusion with the supernatural that women can and should enact. There is no exclusive relationship to a transcendent being called God; there is no mistrust of the flesh and the body; there is sanctity in matter: “We recover indigenous cosmovision as our ‘scientific heritage,’ recognizing the elders as ancient carriers of wisdom” (Memoria 60).49 Similarly, they explain “that the indigenous women of different cultures and civilizations of Abya Yala do not forget that they are daughters of the land, of the sun, of the wind and of fire and that their continuous relation[s] with the cosmic elements strengthen their political participation in favor of indigenous women and indigenous peoples” (Memoria 63).50 The woman’s body, a fluid and permeable corporeality, is conflated with Earth as a sacred place; they regard themselves as an integral part of this sacred Earth. The spirit is not the opposite of matter and neither is the soul of the flesh.

Embodied Religious Thought According to dominant Western epistemic traditions, the very concept of body is formed in opposition to mind. The body is defined as the place of biological data, of the material, of the immanent. Since the seventeenth century, the body has also been conceptualized as that which marks the boundaries between the interior self and the external world.51 In Mesoamerican spiritual traditions, however, the body has characteristics that vastly differ from those of the Western anatomical or biological body. Exterior and interior are not separated by the hermetic barrier of the skin. Between the outside and the inside, permanent and continuous exchange occurs. To gain a keener understanding of how the body is conceptualized in indigenous traditions, we must think of it as a vortex, in whirling, spiral-­ like movement that fuses and expels, absorbs and discards, and through this motion is in permanent contact with all elements in the cosmos.

49  “Retomamos la cosmovisión indígena o ciencia de los Pueblos indígenas, reconociendo a los ancianos y ancianas como portadores de sabiduría ancestral” (Memoria 31). 50  “Que las mujeres indígenas de las diferentes culturas y civilizaciones de Abya Yala no se olviden que son hijas de la tierra del sol, del viento y del fuego y que su relación continua con los elementos cosmogónicos fortalecerán su participación política a favor de las Mujeres indígenas y de los Pueblos indígenas” (Memoria 34). 51  Susan R. Bordo and Alison M. Jaggar, eds., Gender/Body/Knowledge (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 4.

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A Spirituality of Collectivity and the Interconnectedness of All Beings For indigenous peoples, then, the world is not “out there,” established outside of and apart from them. It is within them and even “through” them. Actions and their circumstances are much more interwoven than is the case in Western thought, in which the “I” can be analytically abstracted from its surroundings. Furthermore, the body’s porosity reflects the essential porosity of the cosmos, a permeability of the entire “material” world that defines an order of existence characterized by a continuous interchange between the material and the immaterial. The cosmos literally emerges, in this conceptualization, as the complement of a permeable corporeality. It is from this very ample perspective that the controversial term complementarity should be revisited according to its usage by indigenous women. From their perspective, it is not only feminine and masculine that are complementary. As Comandanta Esther insisted in her address to the Mexican Congress, complementarity embraces everything in nature. She explained that earth is life, is nature, and we are all part of it. This simple phrase expresses the interconnectedness of all beings in the Mesoamerican cosmos. Beings are not separable from one another. This principle engenders a very particular form of human collectivity with little tendency to individuation. This sense of connectedness has been found consistently within contemporary indigenous medical systems and also in the first historical primary sources.52 The “I” cannot be abstracted from its surroundings. There is a permanent transit between the inside and the outside.53 Carlos Lenkesdorf interprets an expression of the Tojolabal language (a Mayan language of Chiapas): “Lajan, lajan aytik.” The phrase literally means “estamos parejos” (we are all even), but should be understood as “we are all subjects.” Lenkesdorf holds that this phrase conveys the “intersubjectivity” basic to Tojolabal culture.54 “Spirituality,” say the women at the summit, is born from this vision and concept according to which all beings that exist in Mother Nature are interrelated. Spirituality is linked to a communitarian sense for which all beings are interrelated and complement each other in their existence  Lopez Austin, Human Body and Ideology.  Marcos, “Embodied Religious Thought,” 76. 54  Carlos Lenkesdorf, Los Hombres Verdaderos: Voces y Testimonios Tojolabales (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1999). 52 53

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(Memoria 28). Among the examples of several pervasive spiritual and cosmological references reproduced by the indigenous women of the Americas, this one seems to be at the core: the interconnectedness of everyone and everything in the universe. The intersubjective nature of men and women is interconnected with earth, sky, plants, and planets. This is how we must understand the defense of the earth “that gives us life, that is the nature that we are,” as Comandanta Esther explained to the legislators. “Indigenous peoples’ spirituality,” the summit document declares: “revives the value of nature and humans in this century. The loss of this interrelationship has caused a disequilibrium and disorder in the world” (Memoria 134).55 Additionally, “a cosmic and conscious spirituality aids to re-establish equilibrium and harmony . . . as women we have the strength, the energy capable of changing the course for a better communal life” (Memoria 135).56 Ultimately, “spirituality emerges from traditional wisdom,” but the document also stresses that “we have to be conscious of the richness of the worldwide cultural diversities” (Summit Doc. Género 31). Here again, we perceive a characteristic of openness, a “transnational” consciousness that has been influenced by women’s movements and feminist practices. Indigenous ethnicities are not self-enclosed but rather envision themselves in active interaction with a world of differences: national, binational, and transnational. The international indigenous movements are building bridges all over the world and gaining momentum. There is a growing transnational language of cultural rights espoused by the “indigenous” worldwide. They all acknowledge the damage that diverse colonialisms have done to their worldviews and have begun to echo one another concerning the value of recovering their own spiritualities and cosmologies.57 55  “En la Espiritualidad de los pueblos indigenas se recupera el valor importante de la naturaleza y el ser humano . . . la perdida de esta relación ha desatado una serie de desequilibrios en el mundo.” 56  “Una espiritualidad cosmica y consciente conduce al equilibrio, a la armonía. . . . Como mujeres tenemos la fuerza, la energía capaz de cambiar rumbos hacia una mejor vida comunitaria.” 57  See Mere Kepa, “The Coastal Blues and the Darker Picture of Development,” paper presented at To Live as a Maori conference, Maori Sector of the Association of University Staff, Hui Te Kupenga o Te Matauranga Marae, June 22–23, 2006, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand; Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; Darilyn Siem, “Religious Healing,” paper presented at the 10th International Women and Health Meeting, September 5, 2005, New Delhi, India; Nellys Palomo, Eleanor Dictaan-Bang-oa, and Jack

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In recent years, indigenous peoples have intensified their struggle to break free from the chains of colonialism and its oppressive spiritual legacy. Indigenous women’s initiatives to recover their ancestral religious legacy constitute a decolonizing effort. Through a deconstruction of past captivities, they re-create a horizon of ancestrally inspired spirituality. They lay claim to an ethics of recovery, while rejecting the violence and subjugation suffered by their ancestors within the religious and cultural domain. “We only come to ask for justice,” the organized indigenous women have repeatedly declared. Yes, justice is their demand: material, social, and political justice. They also seek recognition of and respect for their cosmological beliefs as an integral part of their feminist vision.

G.  L. Medrana, “Conflict Resolution and Gender in Mexico: The Role of Women in Achieving Autonomy,” Tebtebba: Indigenous Peoples International Centre for Policy Research and Education, Baguio City, Philippines, 2003; Manu’atu, “Katoanga Fiaba”; and Duane Champagne and Ismael Abu-Saad, eds., Indigenous and Minority Education: International Perspectives on Empowerment (Beer-Sheva, Israel: Negev Center for Bedouin Development, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2005).

PART II

Indigenous Dreams, Indigenous Resistance

CHAPTER 5

Mapping the Autochthonous Indigenous Church: Toward a Decolonial History of Christianity in las Américas Jennifer Scheper Hughes

When we speak of decolonial histories of the church in Latin America we must begin with a confrontation with the colonial death world to which the Christian religion was inextricably bound.1 The Spanish arrival to the Americas brought cataclysm and catastrophe to the continent, laying its peoples and lands to waste. So profound was the demographic disaster that today some geologists argue the indigenous demographic catastrophe of the sixteenth century is recorded in measurable alterations in the arctic glacial ice core.2 Glacial ice records the solemn imprint of human loss under European global imperialism. Indigenous communities struggled 1  The research elaborated here forms part of my current book project, Contagion and the Sacred in Mexico, funded and supported by the University of California President’s Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. 2  Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519, no. 7542 (2015): 171–180, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14258

J. S. Hughes (*) University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_5

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to survive the onslaught of death due to colonial violence and its sequelae, epidemic disease. They were concerned not only with their own preservation, however. America’s colonized peoples often perceived that the forced introduction of Christianity under colonial rule did not so much deliver the sacred as threaten to annihilate it. The Spanish themselves recognized and decried colonial destruction. Bartolomé de las Casas, the famed defender of the Indians, spent half a century holding the empire to account for indigenous death. Enrique Dussel dubs Las Casas’ critique, “the first anti-discourse of all modernity” in the essay included in this volume. Las Casas was not, however, a lone prophetic voice crying out in the wilderness, even though he clearly felt this to be the case. In fact, lament for a ruined land and a lost people was one of the predominant Spanish theological narratives through the long centuries of conquest and colonial rule. One could say that emotionally affecting critique of indigenous suffering wrought by colonial violence and exploitation is among the foundational Christian discourses in Latin America. The entire evangelizing body, that is, the entire institutional apparatus and its personnel—priests, friars, theologians, and bishops—did the brunt of the work of colonial mourning. In sermons, theological treatises, magisterial histories, and urgently penned epistles to the king they wove words to create worlds of emotion. Given their predominance in the historical record, we must ask what work these narratives did in relation to colonial regimes. In the colonial setting, these affecting narratives seem to have had the capacity to address and somehow even mitigate—for Spanish Christians—the persistent paradox of global imperial Christianity: the raw contradiction between the brutal reality of colonial violence and the utopian promise of Christian conversion. That is, they performed the act of mourning even while the fundamental structures of Christian imperialism endured intact. These cathartic expressions may have thus served in some sense to uphold the very colonial regimes that they criticized, insofar as they created a space within which the friars could be protected from contradiction, and exempt themselves from culpability for colonial destruction. Even as they begin to approximate the scope of suffering and death, Spanish colonial theological lamentations, affecting and profound, also have the capacity to obscure indigenous perspectives and elide indigenous agency. Spanish colonialist perspectives like this have deeply penetrated our received understanding of the key dynamics of Christian origins in the Americas in ways that are still obscured to us. They have particularly

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shaped our ways of thinking about indigenous articulations with and of Christianity. We have accepted pretty much without question the missionary idea that they are the primary agents of Christianization in the hemisphere, and Christian evangelization is the crowning and culminating achievement of the imperial exercise. Contemporary discourse, even when framed in critical terms, too often rehearses Spanish missiological understandings: the Christianization of the hemisphere lies wholly with the always complicit, frequently coercive, and sometimes violent efforts of Spanish missionaries. Its presence is evidence of the brutality and inevitability of Spanish domination in the Americas and the defeat of its indigenous inhabitants. In this paradigm, Christian conversion is equated with indigenous conquest. The myth of spiritual conquest, in essence the juxtaposition of indigenous sovereignty and acceptance of the Christian religion, is a fundamentally Spanish worldview and an essentially colonialist framing.3 The sixteenth-century Franciscan missionary Jerónimo de Mendieta lauded the conqueror Cortés for his Catholic faith, and understood that the spiritual conquest completed, rather than contradicted, the Spanish military conquest. He celebrated the Franciscan order’s success in the violent extirpation or destruction of indigenous temples and deities. In his Historia eclesiástica Indiana, Mendieta legislates Christian practice as irreconcilable with indigenous spirituality and culture: the great accomplishment of the friars was that they vanquished indigenous religion and successfully replaced it with Christianity. There are strong echoes of spiritual conquest discourse in the frequent assertion today that indigenous Christianity is the consequence of colonial domination: compelled to surrender their religious and political sovereignty to the Spanish imperial project, indigenous peoples sacrificed the integrity of their culture and became (at least nominally) Christian for the sake of survival. Even when recast as contemporary critical discourse, these paradigms rehearse colonialist categories and narratives inherited from the Spanish missionaries themselves. They do not capture or encompass the diversity of ways that indigenous communities understood themselves and

3  Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico; an Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).

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their history of engagement with the Christian religion.4 They do not fully accord with the historical record for sixteenth-century Mexico, or even with Latin America as a whole. Toward a decolonial history of Christianity in Latin America, I identify indigenous counterclaims to the Spanish narrative of spiritual conquest. As Dussel explains, “To think theologically from the oppressed colonial subjectivity, and having critical consciousness that this ‘being colonial’ is in fact the theme of this reflection; that is already an act of adopting the perspective of an epistemological de-colonizing of theology.”5 For colonial New Spain, there are ample indigenous-authored sources and materials to consult in the pursuit of indigenous perspectives, as well as eruptions in the Spanish historical record that are signs of indigenous counterclaims to Spanish understandings. To be sure, there are numerous examples in which indigenous communities represent themselves as an abused, even ruined, people, including as victims of spiritual violence. Consider the titulos primordiales, colonial indigenous land grant titles, which contain many references to “various forms of religious conquest carried out by friars,” for example, Spaniards destroying or “breaking up the gods.”6 Yet, in my study of the historical record, these sorts of narratives of trauma and defeat are frequently muted in collective representation of indigenous community histories. For the most part, these communities do not represent themselves as vanquished and annihilated. Neither do they typically portray themselves as having succumbed to Christianity in defeat. In fact, many Mesoamerican narratives contradict the colonialist chronicle by positioning indigenous communities at the center of Christian history in Latin America. Through close engagement with indigenous-authored colonial era materials, I arrive at a challenging conclusion: the proliferation of Christianity across the continent is not primarily the work of Spanish missionaries, who would have us accept the achievement as wholly as their own. Instead, Christian proliferation and persistence is largely the work of 4  Jorge Klor de Alva considers the various ways that indigenous communities have responded to Christianity. Jorge Klor de Alva, “Spiritual Accommodation and Conflict in New Spain: Towards a Typology of Aztec Responses to Christianity,” in The Inca and Aztec States, 1400–1800: Anthropology and History - Harvard University, ed. G.A. Collier (New York: Academic Press, 1982), 345–66. 5  Enrique Dussel, “Epistemological Decolonization of Theology,” Chap. 2, this volume. 6  Stephanie Wood, “The Cosmic Conquest: Late-Colonial Views of the Sword and Cross in Central Mexican ‘Títulos,’” Ethnohistory 38, no. 2 (1991): 185–86.

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indigenous Christians themselves. This was because somehow, in the first century of Christian presence, indigenous communities throughout New Spain came to regard the new religion as their own, and Christian deities, Christian churches, sacred sites, and Christian rites, as under their care and protection. In Mexico, it was also because, in strategic deliberation, they realized that they could leverage the church to preserve and defend some of the most precious structures of Mesoamerican society. This claim by no means is meant to justify the brutality of the colonial regime nor is it an attempt to mitigate the complicity of the global imperial church in the destruction of indigenous peoples. Rather, the possibility of an autochthonous indigenous Christianity must be held in tension with, resting painfully alongside, the reality of colonial violence and imposition: both defined the lived experience of many indigenous communities that suffered and survived the colonial cataclysm.

Cartographies of the Indigenous Christian Imaginary In the course of the sixteenth century, indigenous communities across New Spain grafted the Christian church onto their own histories, cosmologies, and landscapes, creating the mythologies, structures, and institutions that would ensure the church’s projection into the future. Elsewhere I have argued that material religion, specifically object-oriented ontologies, anchor the practice of Christianity in Latin America, amounting to an indigenous counter-conquest, a contraconquista to use the term coined by Cuban theorist, Jose Lezama Lima.7 There is ample evidence for this counter-conquest in the agentic images and objects that orient Christian practice, as devotees discern and then enact the desires and intentions of their treasured santos. Here I suggest that the counter-­ conquest is evident also in the construction of churches and their emplacement on indigenous landscapes in relation to indigenous histories and cosmologies. Churches and saints, both were encompassed within indigenous structures of care and guardianship of the sacred. The physical 7  José Lezama Lima, “La curiosidad barroca,” in La expresión Americana (Fondo de Cultura Económica: 1993). See also English excerpt and translation: “Baroque Curiosity” in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, eds, Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Durham: Duke: 2010, 212–240), 213. Lima explains, it is not the art of Tridentine “counterreform” but the art of “counter conquest”. Celoria subsequently picks up the theme of counter-conquest in his Ensayo de contraconquista (2001)

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structure of the church, comprehended within the frame of material Christianity, actually comes to signify sovereignty rather than conquest. A particular set of colonial indigenous mapas produced in the last quarter of the sixteenth century reveal indigenous histories of Christian beginnings. The indigenous-authored territorial maps of the Relaciones geográfricas contain complex representations of local and regional geography and landscape, ancestral lineage, pictographic place names, roads, figures, and architectural structures. Produced in the aftermath of one of the most pronounced periods of colonial devastation and death, the mapas were painted just when the indigenous population had plummeted to its historic nadir. The maps were drawn in response to a widely circulated royal survey through which King Phillip II hoped to see and assess his colonial holdings and their natural and human potential as sources of gain.8 Yet the local maps created by indigenous cartographers, painters, and scribes defied European cartographic norms, and proved more or less illegible to a Spanish audience.9 That is to say that the mapas of the Relaciones geográficas failed utterly in their colonial purpose. But they did capture and communicate indigenous collective self- understandings at a critical historical juncture. The mapas have been much admired and analyzed by Mesoamericanist scholars and art historians, studied and consulted for generations as lenses into the pre-Hispanic past, for clues into Mesoamerican cosmologies, and for evidence of cultural survival in the colonial period. Long understood as “memories to order,” the mapas are nostalgic recollections of an idealized past before colonial disruption, a past characterized by social and cultural integrity and well-ordered communal relationships.10 In my reading, however, the maps are not just windows onto a past, snapshots of a particular epistemological worldview frozen in time captured for posterity. Rather, they are generative, producing and then codifying new indigenous knowledge. Anchored in the present, tied to the past, and oriented to the future, I argue that the mapas are fundamentally propositional: that is, 8  Mundy explains that the purpose of the relaciones was to make New Spain “visible” to the king. Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 12, 23. 9  Mundy, 34. 10  Serge Gruzinski and Eileen Corrigan, The conquest of Mexico: the incorporation of Indian societies into the Western world, 16th–18th centuries (Cambridge, UK; Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA, USA: Polity Press  ; Marketing and production, Blackwell Publishers, 1993).

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with the king as their stated audience, the mapas are a proffered covenant, articulating a particular vision for a Christian future anchored in the indigenous present.11 As we know, in the sweep of biblical history covenant always follows cataclysm.12 The crux of my argument is that these indigenous-authored maps can be read as offering an assent to Christianity circumscribed within the parameters of local and regional indigenous authority and jurisdiction. This view is captured by close analysis of the appearance of physical church structures on the mapas and their positioning in relation to other indigenous motifs and imagery. Through the emplacement of churches, these maps graft Christianity onto local indigenous cartographies, summoning an idealized landscape that projects the church into an indigenous future. Accepting Christianity but refusing Spanish authority over Christian practice, and eschewing adherence to a vision of a church universal, the version of indigenous Christianity depicted in the mapas is geographically bounded and defined in relation to indigenous structures of authority. Read together, they put forth and solidify a vision of local indigenous sovereignty over Christian institutions and structures that becomes one of the predominant articulations of Christianity in Mexico.13 In probing the indigenous origins of American Christianity, my attention turns then to the representation of churches in the mapas. Though churches also abound in the mapas of the Relaciones geográfricas, with the exception of Dana Leibsohn’s groundbreaking study and Eleanor Wake’s recent art historical monograph on the materiality of churches they have been largely neglected in pursuit of the labor of retrieving a pre-Hispanic past.14 Dana Leibsohn has cataloged nearly four hundred maps (including 11  Diana Magaloni-Kerpel identifies covent imagery in the Florentine Codex. MagaloniKerpel, Diana, “Painting a New Era: Conquest, Prophecy, and the World to Come,” in Invasion and Transformation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico, Mesoamerican Worlds (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2008), http://nrs.harvard. edu/urn-3:hul.ebookbatch.PMUSE_batch:muse9781607320012 12  Note the Mexican art historian at LACMA who interprets the appearance of a rainbow over an illustration depicting the arrival of the Spanish to the New World as indicating the spiritual conquest as a “new covenant”. 13  I was first brought to consider the relationship between churches, grids, and indigenous landscapes in the mapas of the Relaciones geográfricas by William B. Taylor, in his essay on the Texupa map in Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History. 14  Dana Leibsohn, “Colony and Cartography: Shifting Signs on Indigenous Maps of New Spain,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, ed. Claire J. Farago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 264–81; Eleanor

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the mapas of the Relaciones geográficas) painted between 1570 and 1630. Of these, over three hundred have churches.15 Especially after 1550, “churches proliferated on maps, insinuating themselves into the landscape in multifarious ways.”16 Until recently, the representation of churches has been more or less dispensed with by identifying them as simple markers of place, for example as a star appears on a map legend to mark a capital city.17 After the middle of the century, churches absorb “the toponymic function of hill glyphs,” art historian Dana Leibsohn writes.18 That is, they function as place names. Focused study of the positioning of churches in relation to indigenous landscapes, symbols, objects, and structures reveals multileveled indigenous contextualizations of Christianity in relation to inherited indigenous structures of authority and tradition.

The World Map of Teozacoalco The Mapa of Teozacoalco is one of the most famous and most impressive of the extant colonial mapas.19 Like many others, I am drawn to it for its complexity and density of images, stories, and symbols, and for its transparently and profoundly indigenous aesthetic and ethos. But also I am attracted by the prevalence of church structures that punctuate the landscape. Painted in 1580, the mapa represents the sacred history of the Mixtec people of San Pedro Teozacoalco, located in the modern day state of Oaxaca (Fig.  5.1).20 Held by the Benson Library at UT Austin, the Teozacoalco map is the largest in the collection. Measuring 142x177 centimeters, it takes several staff to unfurl the great masterpiece from its roll, which they do with care and reverence. The map is so large that when Wake, Framing the Sacred: The Indian Churches of Early Colonial Mexico (Norman: University Of Oklahoma Press, 2016). 15  Leibsohn, “Colony and Cartography: Shifting Signs on Indigenous Maps of New Spain,” 279. 16  Leibsohn, 267. 17  Mundy writes of the symbolism of the churches on these landscapes is that the mapas “uses churches to symbolize human settlements as was typical of coeval European maps.” Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, 70. 18  Leibsohn, “Colony and Cartography: Shifting Signs on Indigenous Maps of New Spain,” 275. 19  Stephanie Woods extraordinary and important digital and annotated archive of the maps was essential for this project. https://mapas.uoregon.edu/teoz 20  Alfonso Caso, El mapa de Teozacoalco (México, D.F.: Editorial Cultura, TG, SA, 1949).

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Fig. 5.1  Mapa de Teozacoalco, Oaxaca, 1580, 138 cm  ×  176  cm. (Detail: Benson Library, University of Texas, Austin. Photograph by author)

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displayed, it occupies several library tables. The canvass is composed of 23 discreet sheets of European paper that have been bound together by adhesive. In person, the map is less densely compacted and lighter in feel then it appears in reproductions. At the center of the large, rectangular textile appears a sea blue cosmic orb, the circular body of the town and its surrounding geography appears almost as a pulsating heart, crisscrossed by pulsating veins of roads and footpaths. Regarding circular maps, Amara Solari has explained, that these are a unique indigenous and uniquely colonial invention, and that they refer to a “communicentric view”: [The] round maps invented in the early colonial period cannot be attributed to recent European influence or a pre-Columbian cartographic practice, as one has yet to come to light. Rather, this compositional form is a colonial invention, derived from pre-Colombian spatial conceptions, which understood space, and particularly one’s home territory, in circular terms.21

In its globelike structure, the community projects itself into a Christian-­ indigenous plane. But we should not assume that this is a closed system. Three parallel lines of lineage, running vertically from top to bottom, score the map. Collectively, these depict six centuries of the genealogy of the ruling family of Teozacoalco, from the tenth century to the close of the sixteenth (the time of the writing of the mapa), without interruption.22 Shown are rituals of rulership ascension dating from 1125. Here we see depicted the original pilgrimage, sacred journey, and alliances that form the origin of the community. In keeping with the Mesoamerican cartographic tradition, the indigenous mapas in the Relaciones geográficas are deliberately, almost playfully, multivalent, intended to be read on a variety of levels. This is no less true of the Mapa of Teozacolaco that refers simultaneously to local geography, political organization, and sacred history, to name just a few. Including key features of the landscape, the circular territorial body is encompassed by 46 territorial boundary markers. Here the churches, all uniform, with arched doorway and topped by red cross, appear as the most important of territorial markers, reflecting the increasing and urgent need to defend 21  Amara L. Solari, “Circles of Creation: The Invention of Maya Cartography in Early Colonial Yucatán,” The Art Bulletin 92, no. 3 (2010): 154. 22  Wood mapas project.

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and reassert territorial claims in the aftermath of colonial cataclysm—both because of population decline and due to environmental changes and increasing Spanish claims to grazing land. At the same time the Mapa also captures the structures of regional political organization: here are identified the relation of subordinate pueblos to the pueblo cabecera (head town). That is, the Mapa refers not just to a particular town but also to a geographically contiguous and connected territory: there are 13 distinct communities that appear within the circular frame, each represented by a church. As pueblo cabecera, Teozacoalco itself appears as in the large monastery complex that occupies the visual center of the map. The small churches do not represent distance from the pueblo cabecera so much as they indicate subordinate, tributary status. The church glyphs do not just mark space but reveal the social order of an extensive territory. Most importantly for my purposes, the church is given sacred significance in the Mapa of Teozacoalco, contextualized and defined in relation to the sacred histories, including dynastic histories that anchor and define local community identity. In his extensive study of another early colonial era indigenous map, the Mapa of Cuauhtinchan II, Harvard historian of religion, David Carrasco explains of the maps, “that their narrative is an unfolding of a genre of ‘sacred history’ from start to finish. In this view the mapa records a ‘progressive descent of the sacred into the concrete.’ Into the places peoples and lineages of Cuauhtinchan.”23 Like many other indigenous maps of this kind, the Mapa of Teozalcoalco similarly provides a visualization of “local history, specifically, localized tales of cosmogenesis,” or cosmic origin.24 In particular it represents the origin, integrity, and persistence of the altepetl: the basic unit of Nahua social organization: the Mesoamerican ethnic state. The visual center of the Mapa of Teozacoalco is to the left and just slightly above the horizontal median. Here we find the large monastery complex with its church and enclosed walled atrial courtyard, and the governing palace. The church is nestled at a major crossroads, with roads heavily trafficked by people, beasts of burden, and livestock. Mundy writes of the church in Mesoamerican colonial maps as a sort of axis mundi, “In addition, the monasteries on the Guaxtepec, Cholula, Acapistla maps are 23  Davíd Carrasco and Scott Sessions, eds., Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest: An Interpretive Journey through the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2, Har/Map edition (Albuquerque: Cambridge, MA: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 429. 24  Solari, “Circles of Creation,” 154.

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in central, dominant positions, indicating that their artists envisioned each of the monasteries to be the axis mundi of the town.”25 I similarly term this the central matrix, or sacred center of the map. The key to comprehending the meaning of this structural complex for the community of Teozacoalco is the royal lineage that simultaneous descends into and emerges out of the compound. In this way, the church is defined in relation to the royal lineages of the Mixtec history and foundational origins of the town. Thus the church is both governed under and governed by structures of indigenous authority and rule. This is true also in many of the mapas of the Relaciones geográficas, in which seated indigenous figures representing specific governing individuals are positioned facing the churches under their authority. In the Mapa of Cuauhtinchan David Carrasco also has agreed there is evidence that churches were bound to altepetl in the Mapa of Cuauhtinchan in a way that appears to be covenantal.26 Linguistic historian, James Lockhart affirms that the church is the “central tangible symbol of the altepetl’s sovereignty and identity.”27 Grand monastery churches were seen as belonged to the whole of the altepetl, as Lockhart explains.28 This association is visually represented in the appearance of church glyphs on the mapas. Overwhelmingly, the actual physical structures referred to in the mapas were built by indigenous laborers and then maintained by the traditional structures that organized care for the sacred. Eleanor Wake notes that while indigenous communities refused other key manifestations of Christianity, attendance at Mass and indoctrination schools, that they embraced the construction of churches.29 When noting the “enthusiasm” of indigenous communities for building churches, the friars observed that these could completed within six or seven months, a stunning expression of dedication and effort. The decade of most intense church construction, 1570–80, is precisely the same decade in which the mapas of the Relaciones geográficas were painted. Under the steady, careful hand of indigenous craftspeople and artisans, a preponderance, almost saturation, of ­indigenous  Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, 82.  Personal communication with David Carrasco, at the Peabody Museum Mesoamerican Studies Center, Spring 2017. 27  James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries, 1 edition (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1994), 206. 28  Lockhart, 257. 29  Wake, Framing the Sacred, 84–87. 25 26

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symbols imbued and infused the sacred into the churches erected in this generation. Indigenous painting, masonry, and stonework defined the architecture of the “Indian churches” of New Spain.30 Local people usually took entire credit for building the main church.31 Through the second half of the sixteenth century, churches were largely under the care and guardianship of indigenous structures of authority and leadership. Given indigenous authority over a large part of their construction and maintenance, it is not surprising that in many of the mapas churches appear as portals or gateways to the sacred, as cave or mountain-like. The 1579 map of Suchitepec, Oaxaca has multiple squishy cavelike church glyphs. Wake notes that the central church of Suchitepec appears on its mapa as a “mountain-church with jaguar skin threshold.”32 Like the Mapa of Teozacoalco, others in the collection also engage in the artistic and spiritual labor of integrating Spanish ecclesial architecture onto indigenous sacred landscapes and histories. Pueblos de indios throughout Mexico did not deny the existence of Spanish structures of rule, but rather claimed community sovereignty within these colonial structures. The phenomenon of nested sovereignties, of indigenous sovereignty nested within a larger foreign, invading state, has been identified and described by Native American Studies scholar, Audra Simpson. In Mohawk Interruptus, Simpson explores Mohawk contemporary politics of refusal (i.e., the refusal to become citizens either of the United States or Canada) and argues that they live instead within a realm of nested sovereignty: “one sovereign political order can exist nested within a sovereign state, albeit with enormous tension around issues of jurisdiction and legitimacy.”33 The indigenous authored mapas of the Relaciones geográficas suggest that nested sovereignty was a Native American strategy in other regions of the hemisphere and in other periods of history. Even before the arrival of the Spanish, in Mesoamerican social structures, native peoples understood themselves as pertaining to a series of concentric circles of belonging. The mapas are not nostalgic but future-oriented: projecting indigenous Christian community, identity, and sovereignty into the next age.

 Wake, Framing the Sacred.  Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest, 257. 32  Wake, Framing the Sacred, 116. 33  Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press: Durham ; London, 2014). 30 31

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Conclusions It is not possible to disengage, to sever, or uncouple the history of Latin American Christianity from the global imperial project, or from colonial violence. This is the worst sort of revisionist history that engages in the radical denial of suffering. But neither can we juxtapose Christianity and indigeneity. For, as I argue here, the survival of Christianity in Latin America cannot be understood only as the product of colonial imposition and imperial terror. It proliferated because surviving indigenous communities decided that it would and should survive. In as much as Christianity was imposed upon the continent by force and coercion, the adopted religion was also compelled to yield to indigenous preferences and ideas about the sacred. Historian Inga Clendinnen recognized that while indigenous sovereignty and Christian adherence were mutually exclusive from the perspective of Spanish Christians, this was not so for indigenous Christian communities throughout New Spain. In her inimitable powerful style, Clendinnen describes the Maya Christian worldview after one of the most brutal episodes of religious violence in the colonial history of Latin America, the Franciscan Diego de Landa’s torture of almost 4500 Maya Christians who he feared had relapsed into practices of idolatry and sacrifice. Yet though the Maya had come to understand, through Spanish brutality, that the friars intended Christianity to be exclusive of indigenous spirituality, they never conceded this to be the case. Clendinnen writes that in embracing the Christian religion the Maya did not surrender to Spanish domination: For the Maya there was no tension between their repudiation of the Spanish claim to rule and to the monopolistic control of Christian truth, and their acceptance of the Christian gods as deities whose time had come: when the Lord Jesus Christ descends in the Province of Yucatan, then at last there will be an end to the domination of the foreigners and of submission to their exactions. Then the rule of the Lord Jesus Chris, and of his Maya lords, will begin.34

The picture that I have painted here aligns with what I have come to understand through my ethnographic work among indigenous descended Catholic communities in the Mexican state of Morelos. To this day local  Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests (2003), 192.

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communities often repudiate the authority of outside priests to legislate local Christian practice, and may even place traditional, inherited structures of local authority and rule above the power of Rome and the Vatican when these legislations and teachings differ from community consensus.35 In our ongoing pursuit of decolonial histories of Christianity in Latin America, we must consider the possibility that the church was at times compelled to yield, constrained to accommodate indigenous authority, spiritual discernment, and preferences. If we listen to the mapas, we must consider that Christianity could not have survived without the assent of indigenous communities. The structure of ecclesial historiography can be revised to orient around indigenous analytics, interpretations, and vernaculars for comprehending the indigenous origins and structures of the American articulation with the Christian religion.

35  Jennifer Scheper Hughes, “Traditionalist Catholicism and Liturgical Renewal in the Diocese of Cuernavaca, Mexico.” In, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Timothy Matovina, and Robert A. Orsi, Catholics in the Vatican II Era: Local Histories of a Global Event (New York, NY, USA ; Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

CHAPTER 6

Indigenous Christianities: Ritual, Resilience, and Resistance Among the Nahuas in Sixteenth-Century Mexico Verónica A. Gutiérrez

Introduction As the darkness of winter enveloped the Viceroyalty of New Spain in the final days of 1551, the macehualtin (indigenous commoners) of San Pedro Cholula felt troubled.1 For the better part of two years, the altepetl (native community) had been constructing a massive church dedicated to St. Gabriel the Archangel alongside a friary for the resident Franciscans. Nearing completion, the structure rose upon the ruins of the once-­ splendorous teocalli (god-house) devoted to Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, using the very same stones.2 Unfortunately, preoccupation with  Throughout this essay, I use “Viceroyalty of New Spain,” “New Spain,” and “colonial Mexico” interchangeably. 2  The Franciscan bishop, fray Martín Sarmiento de Hojacastro, would consecrate the new church on April 3, 1552. See Ignacio Cabral, Arquitectura religiosa en San Pedro Cholula, Puebla (Puebla: Universidad de las Americas-Puebla, 1994), 1, and Francisco de la Maza, La 1

V. A. Gutiérrez (*) Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_6

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this project had exacerbated Cholula’s decade-long struggle to fulfill its tribute obligations, a predicament dating back to at least 1538.3 Despite multiple deferments, the macehualtin remained heavily indebted to the Spanish Crown, prompting Cholula’s pipiltin (indigenous leaders) to appeal directly to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.4 Gathering to confer in cabildo—a Spanish-style municipal council overseen by rotating native nobility—the pipiltin composed a Spanish-language letter to the king on January 18, 1552, respectfully requesting a four-year moratorium on tribute. Citing the considerable deaths resulting from the devastating epidemic of 1544–46, the pipiltin also extolled their people’s  role in constructing and subsidizing Cholula’s new church, whose fine craftsmanship rendered it one of the greatest and most costly in all of New Spain.5 Offering to build Cholula in the Spanish style (which had largely been accomplished in the 1540s), the cabildo requests the Spanish rank of city with all accompanying rights and privileges. Though Cholula receives ciudad status, the native Cholulteca continue to struggle with tribute obligations throughout the sixteenth century, writing again to beseech the king for mercy in 1554.6 ciudad de Cholula y sus iglesias, Vol. IX, Es-tudios y fuentes del arte en México (México, D. F.: Universidad nacional autónoma de México, 1959), 62. 3  For the origins of Cholula’s tribute woes, consult Archivo General de las Indias (AGI), Mexico 1088, Legajo 1, Folio 74, dated May 13, 1538. 4  In 1519, Charles I of Spain was consecrated Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. For details of Cholula’s tribute assessments and deferments from 1543 to 1556, see “Tasación de Chilula, 1556,” (AGI, Patronato, legajo 182, ramo 2) in Sobre el modo de tributar los indios de Nueva España a Su Majestad, 1561–1564 (México, D.F.: José Porrúa e Hijos, Sucs., 1958), 82–84. See also Archivo General Municipal de Puebla (AGMP): Actas de Cabildo, Vol. 4, Foja 310v and AGMP: Actas de Cabildo, Vol. 5, Foja 61f. 5  See “Carta al Emperador de los indios de Cholula, 1552” (AGI, Audiencia de México, 94). Francisco González-Hermosillo notes that Charles V granted Cholula an indigenous cabildo by royal decree on October 27, 1537, in appreciation of indigenous aid to Hernando Cortés during the Sack of Tenochtitlan and in recognition of its ancient splendor. Unfortunately, he does not cite his source. See “Macehuales versus señores naturales. Una mediación franciscana en el cabildo indio de Cholula ante el conflicto por el servicio personal (1553–1594),” in Gobierno y economía en los pueblos indios del México colonial, ed. Francisco González-Hermosillo (México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional del Antropología e Historia, 2001), 117. 6  The date Cholula received city status continues to confuse scholars. Whereas some sources indicate that, in 1537, the king simultaneously granted Cholula the rank of city and a cabildo (see fn 5 above), in this letter the cabildo requests city status in 1552, for which they thank the king in a follow-up letter dated October 12, 1554. Fray Francisco Morales Valerio, OFM, PhD, the leading expert on Franciscans in Cholula, disputes this, insisting the 1537 date is an

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This episode—which offers rich insight into the relationship between native peoples and Christianity in sixteenth-century central Mexico— serves as an important introduction to this essay for four reasons: (1) it challenges the dominant Eurocentric narrative about passive or fatalistic native peoples, demonstrating indigenous resilience and political savvy in appropriating both the foreigners’ language and characters (Roman letters vs. Mesoamerican pictorials), and the Castilian tradition of directly addressing the king7; (2) it proffers one of the many forms of resistance emerging in the wake of colonial rule, specifically, how native communities exploited the rivalry between Spanish officials and friars for indigenous resources; here, rather than extol Cholula’s military assistance to the Spaniards—which was substantial and which other altepetl emphasize in similar letters to the Crown—the pipiltin instead strategically highlight their acceptance of Christianity and construction of a Christian church8; (3) it exhibits the Catholic practice of appropriating the sacred: converting existing native communities into parishes, using indigenous labor and capital for its construction projects, and usurping the former temple to provide both the location and building materials for the new church; and eighteenth-century fiction. See “Franciscanos y sociedad colonial en Cholula, Siglo XVI” (paper presented at the American Society for Ethnohistory Conference, Oaxaca, Mexico, 2018). For the second letter—in which the cabildo thanks the king for bringing Christianity and repeats its request to be relieved of tribute obligations due to the poverty of Cholula’s native inhabitants— see AGI, Papeles de Simancas, Est. 59, Caja 1, Lec. 3 (Libro de Cartas). Significantly, Cholula would be one of only nine ciudades de indios (indigenous cities) in the colonial period alongside twenty-one ciudades de españoles (Spanish cities). In contrast, Madrid, the capital of Castile since 1561, would remain a Villa (a lower ranking distinction) for centuries. 7  Franciscans would have taught Christianity and alphabetic script to Cholula’s indigenous nobles, who were not the only indigenous community to compose such a letter. For a 1554 Nahuatl letter to Charles V from the cabildo of Tenochtitlan (modern-day Mexico City) and a 1563 Spanish letter from the nobles of Xochimilco to Philip II, see Matthew Restall, Lisa Sousa, and Kevin Terraciano, Mesoamerican Voices: Native-Language Writings from Colonial Mexico, Oaxaca, Yucatan, and Guatemala (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 64–71; for a 1560 Nahuatl letter from Huejotzingo addressed to Philip II, see James Lockhart and Enrique Otte, Letters and People of the Spanish Indies, Sixteenth Century, Cambridge Latin American Studies (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 163–172. 8  Elsewhere I argue that Cholula’s cabildo is capitalizing on its Mesoamerican status as a regional ritual center and locus of political and spiritual influence, given that prior to European arrival, local tlatoque (indigenous rulers) sought counsel from the priests at Cholula’s famed Quetzalcoatl Sanctuary and participated in a legitimation ritual prior to assuming leadership in their home polities. See Verónica A. Gutiérrez. Converting a Sacred City: Franciscan Re-Imagining of Sixteenth-Century San Pedro Cholula (PhD Dissertation, UCLA, 2012: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56h8453h).

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(4) the letter’s language and content indicate Franciscan assistance, reflecting the close association, strategic alliance, and friendship often forged between friars and native people, thus challenging the false binary— encountered most notably among undergraduates—of “good” native peoples/“evil” Europeans.9 The remainder of the essay will explore the extent to which native peoples participated in the development of local indigenous Christianities, a topic receiving considerable scholarly attention in recent years.10 Indeed, since the 1970s, scholars have proposed a reciprocal or collaborative model of evangelization, in essence, a Nahuatilization of Christianity, rather than the static imposition of a foreign belief system.11 Recognizing native agency in the evangelization process, this essay considers various indigenous responses, critiques, collaborations, and expressions of resistance to Christianity. Although Christianization widely affected indigenous communities during the three-hundred-year colonial period (1520s to 1820s), I am restricting my study to the Nahuas in sixteenth-century central Mexico, a people linguistically and culturally linked through their use of Nahuatl. All Mexica (Aztecs) spoke Nahuatl, but not all Nahuas were Mexica, rather, the Nahua region comprised altepetl (Mesoamerican 9  Local Franciscans maintain a close relationship with Cholula’s native cabildo in the sixteenth century, convening an emergency meeting in 1553 to resolve a conflict between elites and commoners. See “Ordenanzas y capítulos que han de guardar los principales y macehuales de Cholula (26 de octubre de 1553),” Newberry Library Ayer Collection, ms. 1121, fs. 355r-161r. For more on the relationship between the Franciscans and the native Cholulteca, see Verónica A. Gutiérrez, Converting a Sacred City as well as “Social Justice for a Sacred City: Franciscans and the indios de servicio of Cholula” (paper presented at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, Bruges, Belgium, 2016). In chapter three of Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), Camilla Townsend details an endearing intellectual friendship between an indigenous noble, don Mateo Sánchez, and a Franciscan, fray Francisco de Toral, affectionately nicknamed Toraltzin (Nahuatl honorific suffix). 10  For two edited collections examining local variations of religious expression, see Martin Austin Nesvig’s Local Religion in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006) and Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole’s Religion in New Spain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007). More recent scholarship includes Davíd Tavárez’s Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2017). 11  See especially Charles Dibble, “The Nahuatilization of Christianity” in Sixteenth Century Mexico: The Work of Sahagún, ed. Munro S. Edmunson (Albuquerque: U. of New Mexico Press, 1974), and Louise Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996).

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ethnic states) in and near the central Valley of Mexico. Today, Mexico is home to over a million Nahuatl speakers, and in certain ancient sites (including, until recently, Cholula’s Great Pyramid), posted information for visitors appears in Spanish, Nahuatl, and English.12 The three essays opening this collection serve to situate my work within a wider Latin American context. Enrique Dussel’s discussion of Christendom subsuming Greco-Roman and Germanic cultural and religious ritual prepares us for what we will encounter in colonial Mexico, namely, Iberian appropriation of local elements and the consequent forging of a new, indigenous Christianity. As Dussel remarks, the European Christianity introduced in New Spain elevated itself as a prototype of human culture with the right to dominate other peoples and cultures. Even so, whereas I recognize elements of resilience, adaptation, and collaboration in the Christianization process, with native peoples retaining varying levels of agency, Dussel categorizes colonial Christians as second class citizens and second class children of God. Sylvia Marcos reveals how this belief persists today among Mexico’s twenty-first-century religious hierarchy, who continue to perceive the indigenous population, especially women, as minors.13 Like the contemporary indigenous communities Marcos studies, the colonial Nahuas in my study survived by reinventing themselves, re-creating their identities while preserving their distinctions. This process benefitted from the geographical good fortune of occurring in the Northern Hemisphere, allowing Catholic clergy in New Spain to 12  During my main research years in Cholula (2004–2009) information at the Great Pyramid site appeared in Spanish, English, and Nahuatl; during a recent visit in May 2019, plaques posted around the ruins presented information only in Spanish and English. For a brief overview of the effects of Christianity among native communities throughout Mesoamerica, see Verónica A.  Gutiérrez and Matthew Restall, “Mesoamerican Religions: Colonial Cultures,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, Second Edition (Macmillan Reference, 2004): 5914–22. 13  Paternalistic attitudes of indigenous “children” originated in the colonial period, especially after the initial phase of euphoria faded following fragmentary success of the evangelizing project. This devolving attitude culminated when the 1585 Mexican Provincial Council—convened to implement the reforms of the Council of Trent (1545–1563)—labeled native peoples “rudes,” a Latin theological term indicating persons incapable of comprehending more than the rudimentary elements of religion. Historian Stafford Poole has masterfully outlined this phenomenon in “The Declining Image of the Indian among Churchmen in Sixteenth-Century New Spain,” Indian-Religious Relations in Colonial Spanish America, ed. Susan E. Ramírez (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989). He argues that an important, often-overlooked factor in this process was the Catholic Reformation, whose proponents denigrated human capacities and emphasized law, regulation, and good order.

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avoid the liturgical disaster Dussel experienced in his Argentinian childhood south of the equator. As we shall see, the Nahuas of colonial Mexico retained a level of agency not permitted Luis N. Rivera-Pagán’s Puerto Rican people, who, in 1917, received the “gift of American citizenship” without being consulted. In contrast, indigenous subjects in colonial Mexico remained active participants in the unfolding of colonial rule—like the Cholulteca, who as we witnessed above, composed a letter to the Spanish Crown arguing for, and receiving, the official rank of city with its associated privileges. Even so, the “double consciousness” Rivera-Pagán identifies in Puerto Rican culture (i.e., transculturation and border thinking) reminds us of renowned ethnohistorian James Lockhart’s “double mistaken identity,” that is, the process whereby both Nahuas and Iberians “take it that a given form or concept is essentially one already known to it, operating in much the same manner as in its own tradition, and hardly takes cognizance of the other side’s interpretation.”14 We shall see this exemplified below.

Christianity’s Arrival Christianity arrived to mainland Mexico on Good Friday, April 22, 1519 at the point of a sword. Hernando Cortés, the Iberian conquistador, dropped anchor on Maundy Thursday in the natural harbor of San Juan de Ulúa, traveling with 11 caravels carrying 16 horses, 550 men, and some small cannon, commissioned by the governor of Cuba for an exploratory mission without the authority to conquer or settle.15 Easter Sunday—one of the most important feasts in the Christian calendar—would prove ­pivotal in the unfolding of empire and Christianity in the New World. That afternoon, following Easter Mass chanted by the Mercederian, fray Bartolomé de Olmedo, Cortés dined with two indigenous lords, emissaries 14  James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 445. 15  The governor, Diego Velasquez, was not himself authorized to conquer or settle, being merely a deputy of the hereditary Admiral of the Indies, Diego Colón, son of Christopher Columbus. In addition to exploring the coast, Cortés had been tasked with trading and searching for shipwrecked Spaniards; he rescued the Franciscan Jerónimo de Aguilar on the Island of Cozumel, who served as his first interpreter. See J.H. Elliot’s introductory essay, “Cortés, Velázquez and Charles V,” in Hernán Cortés: Letters from Mexico. Translated by Anthony Pagden. Revised ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), xi–xxxvii.

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sent by the powerful Moctezuma, whose dominions extended to the coast; their scintillating conversation about the Mexica ruler’s  riches solidified Cortés’ desire to advance inland. According to Spanish sources, he gave an inspired speech during the meal, urging his native companions to abandon their idols and embrace the Christian God. Four months later, he scuttled his ships and rallied his men toward Tenochtitlan, center of the imperialistic, warrior Mexica people, gathering tens of thousands of indigenous allies en route.16 By the time they reached Tenochtitlan in November, they had razed numerous teocalli (god-houses), overturned indigenous altars, erected wooden crosses, and replaced local deities atop bloody sacrificial altars with images of the Virgin Mary. Cortés also repeatedly criticized indigenous religious practices, ignoring the counsel of the priests in his company. Following a two year war, the Spaniards and their indigenous allies vanquished the Mexica people on August 13, 1521, the feast of San Hipólito.17 Such were the inauspicious beginnings of the Christianization of native peoples in New Spain.18 The systematic evangelization of the Nahuas began with the arrival of the Franciscans, the first of whom appeared in 1523, as Mexico City rose among the ruins of Tenochtitlan.19 Led by the Flemish lay brother fray 16  During that time, Cortés legitimated his treasonous activity by founding a town, La Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, and had the municipal officials name him alcalde mayor (chief magistrate), justicia (chief Justice), and captain of the royal army. Cortés officially began his march toward Tenochtitlan on August 16, 1519, from the nearby altepetl of Cempoala, accompanied by 400 Iberians and 1000 Cempoalan allies (Hernán Cortés: Letters from Mexico, xix–xxii). 17  Saint Hippolytus, a third-century Roman scholar who wrote in Greek, was the first antipope. He reconciled with Rome before being martyred (www.britannica.com/biography/ Saint-Hippolytus-of-Rome). 18  Not all contemporary Europeans shared this sentiment, with one of the most famous examples being Cortés’ Iberian chaplain, Francisco López de Gómara, who wrote in 1552: “The greatest event since the creation of the world (excluding the incarnation and death of Him who created it), is the discovery of the Indies.” Historia de la Conquista de México [1552] appears in English as Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary. Translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964). Francisco López de Gómara produced this panegyric to Cortés without ever traveling to the New World. 19  In 1522, Pope Adrian VI issued the papal bull, Exponi nobis feciste, also known as the Omnímoda, granting the mendicants extensive powers to preach, found churches, and administer sacraments in the New World, indeed, to use any means necessary to convert native peoples if a bishop were absent or a two-day journey away. See Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572. Translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley:

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Pedro de Gante, the three original friars settled in nearby Texcoco, constructing a small teaching chapel, “la capilla de la enseñanza,” with roman letters etched into its pillars, as well as a school for the sons of indigenous nobles.20 The following year, the famed “Twelve Apostles” led by fray Martín de Valencia, OFM would land at Veracruz, walking barefoot to Mexico City.21 These early Franciscans would distinguish themselves by establishing schools and studying native languages and cultures, becoming the first New World ethnographers, often assisted by their classically educated trilingual indigenous students fluent in Nahuatl, Latin, and Spanish. The Franciscans, who dominated the central Valley of Mexico, would be joined in 1526 by 12 Dominican friars, who settled further south, and seven Augustinian friars in 1532, compelled to establish conventos (evangelization complexes) in remote or border areas. Secular priests would follow, as well as priests of the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, in 1570. Church hierarchy throughout the 300-year colonial period would remain mostly foreign, criollo (Iberians born in New Spain), or mestizo (mixed University of California Press, 1966), 22. New World friars functioned as virtual bishops at a time when European mendicants were not associated with parishes and required episcopal license to preach. For a detailed discussion of the effects of this bull in New Spain, see Robert Padden, “The Ordenanza de Patronazgo of 1574: An Interpretive Essay,” The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History 12 (1956). 20  Pedro de Gante, reportedly an illegitimate relative of Charles V, famously founded San José de los Naturales in Mexico City. By all accounts, he was well loved by the Texcocana people, who mourned his death in 1572. For a succinct overview of his contributions in New Spain, see Francisco Morales, OFM, “Fray Pedro de Gante. Libro de colores es tu corazón,” in Misioneros de la primera hora. Grandes evangelizadores del Nuevo Mundo. ed. Romeo Ballán, (Lima: Editorial “Sin Fronteras” 1991), 75–81. Available online in the Enciclopedia Franciscana (www.franciscanos.org/enciclopedia/pgante.html). 21  The Twelve represent the first official delegation approved by both papacy and Crown. Two important documents penned by the Franciscan Minister General, fray Francisco de los Ángeles Quiñones, illuminate the context of this enterprise: the Castilian “Instruction” (dated October 4, 1523; feast of St. Francis) addressed to leader fray Martín de Valencia, outlines how to conduct the business of New World evangelization, and the Latin “Obedience” (dated October 30, 1523) addressed to the Twelve, binds them in holy obedience to this mission. For an excellent analysis of these foundational Franciscan documents, see Steve Turley’s Franciscan Spirituality and Mission in New Spain, 1524–1599: Conflict Beneath the Sycamore Tree (Luke 19:1–10) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014). Officially commissioned by fray Francisco de los Ángeles Quiñones on January 25, 1524 (feast of the Conversion of St. Paul), the Twelve arrived at Veracruz in May and Mexico City in June, where Cortés’ warm welcome astonished local Nahuas. Cortés had written to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V specifically requesting Franciscans because they were austere, learned, and would not ask for money.

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blood European and indigenous), though there are a few documented cases of native men ordained to the priesthood.22 So important would the mendicants become in a process the early colonial friars labeled the Spiritual Conquest of Mexico that scholars reference the period between 1524 and 1555 as “The Mendicant Church.”23 In a 1933 seminal text, La conquête spirituelle du Mexique, Robert Ricard examined the activities of the mendicants, arguing that they “spiritually conquered” native peoples in New Spain within a generation; though his work remains foundational, since the 1970s, scholars have challenged his thesis.24 Historians, anthropologists, art historians, and literary critics, some of whom are trained in native languages, are today analyzing indigenous-­ language and indigenous-authored sources unavailable to Ricard, ascribing varying levels of agency to indigenous communities across colonial Mexico. Collectively, their work underscores the extent to which native peoples actively participated in the development of indigenous Christianities.25 22  As an example, see the final chapter of Camilla Townsend’s Annals of Native America, which discusses two late seventeenth-century Nahua brothers don Manuel de los Santos Salazar and the younger, don Nicolás Simeon, who become ordained priests. For more about this family, see Peter Villella, “Indian Lords, Hispanic Gentlemen: The Salazars of Colonial Mexico,” The Americas 69, no. 1 (2012): 1–36. 23  This term belies the conflict between the mendicant orders over territory, indigenous neophytes, and pastoral practices that continued throughout the colonial period. 24  Translated as The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572. 25  This literature is rich and deep, beginning with Mexican scholar, Miguel León-Portilla’s study of Nahua reactions to evangelization: “Testimonios nahuas sobre la conquista espiritual,” in Estudios de cultura náhuatl 11 (1974): 11–36. Certain scholars, such as J. Jorge Klor de Alva in “Spiritual Conflict and Accommodation in New Spain: Towards a Typology of Aztec Responses to Christianity,” (The Inca and Aztec States, 1400–1800: Anthropology and History, ed. George A Collier, et  al., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982: 345–366), and Louise Burkhart in The Slippery Earth contend that the friars ultimately failed to introduce Christianity to New Spain. Prolific Mexican historian and Franciscan friar, Francisco Morales Valerio, challenges such analyses. Of his many publications, see especially “The Native Encounter with Christianity: Franciscans and Nahuas in Sixteenth-Century Mexico” (The Americas, Vol. 65, No. 2, Oct., 2008, 137–159). For a similar interpretation, see also the work of art historian and Jesuit priest, Jaime Lara’s City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004) and Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).

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A Complicit Church? It is problematic to speak of the Catholic Church being complicit in the colonial enterprise, since church and state did not exist independently in sixteenth-century Iberian society, which parallels Mesoamerican culture. More to the point, since the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, the monarchs had enjoyed the privilege of patronato real (royal patronage), that is, they appointed clergy to all major ecclesiastical benefices in the Castilian realms, including the Americas, an entitlement yielded to them in a series of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century papal bulls.26 Though the monarchy essentially controlled the local Catholic Church, to ensure loyalty Isabella tasked her Franciscan confessor, fray Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, with reforming the clergy. By 1517, the archbishop had purged the realm of various abuses, including concubinage and absentee clergy. Though largely successful among his fellow regular clergy, 400 secular clergy fled with their concubines to northern Africa rather than adhere to the Cisnerian reforms.27 Because of Cisneros’ efforts, many of the first mendicants in the New World were renowned for their fervor, humanity, and education. Importantly, sixteenth-century Iberians arrived to New Spain with a Reconquista mentality, that is, they were products of the nearly 800-year war to purge the Iberian Peninsula of the Moors, who had invaded from northern Africa in 711 AD shortly after embracing Islam. Beginning as a feudal struggle to regain lost territories and labor, over the centuries the Reconquista transformed into a religious crusade, normalizing warfare, producing a category of warrior-nobles who scorned manual labor, generating a fervor of religious superiority, and coloring the Iberian response to non-Christians as inferiors deserving forced labor and tribute.

26  The most significant were Alexander VI’s Inter caetera (1493), Eximae devotionis (1493 and 1501), and Julius II’s Universalis ecclesiae (1508), which granted universal patronage over the church in the New World to the Iberian monarchs, including the right to present candidates for ecclesiastical office and the right to collect tithes. See J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). See also Robert Padden, “The Ordenanza de Patronazgo of 1574: An Interpretive Essay” in The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History 12 (1956). The kingdom of Portugal received similar privileges from Pope Calixtus III in 1456. 27  See J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain: 1469–1716 (New York: New American Library, 1963), 102.

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Mesoamerican Religion The  various cultures of Mesoamerica—as beautifully outlined by Sylvia Marcos at the beginning of this volume—perceived of the natural world as a sacred landscape, believing that objects in the physical world were themselves imbued with the divine. This pantheistic belief included not only a certainty in the supernatural nature of all creation but also the conviction that all objects, including mountains and towns, were animate. For Mesoamerican peoples, to consume the goods of the earth was to consume the supreme spirit, a belief that ensured the careful nurturing of the natural landscape and its products.28 Much like sixteenth-century Iberian society, religion served as a unifying factor among Mesoamerican peoples, permeating every aspect of their existence. Daily life unfolded in a manner predetermined by a pantheon of gods who punished misdeeds with illness and responded to veneration with bountiful harvests and victories in conquest. Simply put, Mesoamerican peoples envisioned life as a series of exchanges with the deities and the ancestors in the underworld, a perpetual negotiation that could bring about an agricultural surplus if the gods received the necessary appeasements. The earth functioned as a sacred landscape sustaining mankind; in exchange, demanding that humans be placed on earth to be consumed by the gods. Were one indigenous culture to conquer another, the vanquished peoples would recognize the superiority of the conqueror’s god, placing that deity atop their religious pantheon while continuing to worship their own deities. Cultures across Mesoamerica shared basic philosophical and spiritual principles, including human sacrifice, which was the prime aspect around which most religion revolved. The priestly class—who administered human sacrifice—generally possessed the highest levels of culture and learning, designing buildings, directing religious ceremonies, and training in science and mathematics. Because humans were the highest life form, Mesoamerican peoples considered human sacrifice to be the premier category of exchange with the divine, and in some cases, a necessary act to ensure the rising of the sun or the rotation of the earth. Certain societies in Mesoamerica—like the Mexica—satisfied the divine mandate for human

28  For this section I rely on John M.  D. Pohl’s introduction to Exploring Mesoamerica. Places in Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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sacrifice through the metaphorical performance of warfare, subjecting their captives to heart-sacrifice on the pinnacles of pyramid-mountains. Interestingly, and somewhat counterintuitively, similarities between aspects of Mesoamerican religion and Iberian Catholicism eased the transition to Christianity in the early colonial period.29 Though Mesoamerican peoples were polytheistic, for example, their priests—much like the European clerics who arrived to the New World—were learned, austere, and celibate. More significantly, the early friars perceived in several Nahua rituals a distorted resemblance to certain Catholic sacraments.30 Indeed, the Franciscan fray Toribio de Benavente Motolinía was so impressed by the indigence of the native peoples that in his 1541 book, Historia de los indios de la Nueva España, he portrayed them as natural practitioners of Franciscan apostolic poverty.31 Not all Europeans shared Motolinía’s sentiment, however. Whereas some early mendicants believed that native peoples’ innocence and near nakedness rendered them perfectly poised to receive and embrace Catholicism, others believed Mesoamericans had been tainted by demons who darkened their hearts and directed them to engage in heinous acts.32

Transitioning to Christianity Rather than introduce a unique diocesan system into New Spain, the friars transformed existing indigenous communities into parishes, razing all teocalli (god-houses) that survived the Iberian invasion and overseeing indigenous laborers as they constructed churches atop the ruins, recycling the stones of former sacred structures, as in Cholula. Mendicants appropriated 29  In The Nahuas After the Conquest, distinguished ethnohistorian and Nahuatlato (Nahuatl interpreter), James Lockhart discusses how the Nahua’s highly developed religion lent itself easily to the introduction of Christianity. See especially page 203. 30  Though Robert Ricard touches upon this topic in The Spiritual Conquest, Osvaldo Pardo elaborates in The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 31  Motolinía took his very name from the Nahuatl word for “poor person,” which he overheard the Nahuas murmuring when they encountered him and his companions in their tattered habits. Toribio Benavente Motolinía. History of the Indians of New Spain [1541]. Translated by Francis Borgia Steck O.F.M. (Washington DC: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1951). 32  The best treatment of the devil’s influence in colonial Mexico is Fernando Cervante’s The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

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scared spaces, placing churches atop pyramids, man-made mountains deliberately situated over springs, which Nahuas believed served as portals to the netherworld permitting communication with the divine. Fearful of Mesoamerican religious imagery and artifacts, Europeans confiscated and burned indigenous codices, often publically, to the devastation of local Nahuas. Written in “red and black,” these books would have been decipherable only to specially trained native priests, whose role was immediately eradicated.33 Mendicants would overlay the European church onto preexisting Nahua structures for pragmatic and symbolic reasons, seeking to replace the religious system efficiently. Desiring to ensure loyalty to the new faith, friars would appropriate the sacred essence of these sites via massive churches built by native hands symbolizing the superiority—and permanence—of Christianity.34 The outward transition to Christianity thus proceeded rapidly. Nahuas reacted immediately to this spiritual upheaval, some attempting to reconcile Christianity with their own rituals and beliefs, with others hiding or burying religious images and codices that have proved invaluable to modern-day scholars. Some native priests continued Mesoamerican ritual in caves or on hillsides outside the European purview. Archival records indicate these clandestine activities continued throughout the colonial period.35

Building Programs Much to the surprise of the Iberian conquerors, Mesoamerican peoples participated enthusiastically in mendicant building programs, quickly constructing beautiful European churches in the center of their polities. Though this response initially convinced Iberian friars that Nahuas had 33  Nahuas referenced writing as in tlilli in tlapalli, “the black ink, the colored pigment,” but mainly meant “black and red.” Black ink alone was more indicative of war paint or markings for sacrifice, but together, red and black ink became the term for writing. See Camilla Townsend, Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 2. For a more detailed treatment of indigenous writing, see Elizabeth Hill Boone’s Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). 34  Friars deliberately situated many of these conventos on raised earth in order to highlight their sacred nature. Personal communication, Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, March 26, 2018. 35  For a few examples of resistance and the Mexican Church’s response, see Susan Schroeder’s edited volume, Native Resistance and the Pax Colonial in New Spain. Linguistics and Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

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eagerly embraced Christianity, the reality was that local peoples viewed the monumental structure as an analogue to the preconquest temple, and thus as a symbol of their corporate identity.36 Attempts to build the most splendorous churches did not so much reflect native engagement with Christianity as it reflected the precontact practice of dominating one’s neighboring polities with a splendorous teocalli (god-house). This was especially true of altepetl (native communities) that had enjoyed a sacred identity prior to Iberian invasion, like Cholula. New World conventos (mendicant evangelization complexes) were expansive and walled, comprising a single-nave church (for Europeans), attached two-story cloister, and an open-air chapel (for native people) facing the central courtyard.37 Indigenous laborers and artisans often fused Christian and indigenous elements in the atrial crosses, in some instances placing in its center an obsidian disk, symbolizing sun and sacrifice. Importantly, crosses were not a European introduction, but rather Mesoamerican symbols of water, fecundity, and nourishment representing the Tree of Life. Standing in the center of the atrium, the cross signified the axis mundi for both Europeans and Nahuas. A similar blending of belief appears in the reliefs carved onto the façades of capillas posas, chapels in the corners of the atrium used for pauses during religious procession or for doctrinal instruction.38 Posa chapels were New World inventions, and colonial friars would often divert springs beneath them to imbue them with the sacred.39 Though mendicants  Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest, 206.  Most colonial conventos would have had two to five resident friars, though mendicant training centers, like Cholula, might have on occasion up to twenty friars in residence. For a chart enumerating friars in the conventos in the Bishopric of Tlaxcala in 1585, see Appendix A in Verónica A. Gutiérrez, Converting a Sacred City, which I modified from Pedro Oroz, Gerónimo de Mendieta, Francisco Suárez, and Fidel de Jesús Chauvet, Relación de la descripción de la Provincia del Santo Evangelio: que es en las Indias Occidentales que llaman la Nueva España: hecha en el año de 1585 [1585]. Nueva ed. México D.F.: Imprenta Mexicana de Juan Aguilar Reyes, 1947. 38  In Franciscan establishments, for example, Nahua artisans carved the five wounds of Francis in the Escutcheon of the Order as a dot within a dot, denoting chalchihuitl, or preciousness. Tlacuilos also carved blood from the wounds with featherlike qualities, placing the implements of piercing inside the “sack” of the fifth wound, much like the implements of Mesoamerican auto-sacrifice would be placed into a sacred vessel. Personal communication, Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, March 26, 2018. 39  Personal communication, Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, March 26, 2018. As previously stated, Mesoamerican springs served as portals to the underworld enabling communication with the divine. 36 37

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appreciated the artistry and beauty of indigenous designs, modern scholars see in their details covert references to native belief, variously interpreted as active resistance or sophisticated attempts to harmonize Nahua past and present.

Colonial Art In addition to crafting atrial crosses and decorating posa chapels, tlacuilos (native artists) executed European-style murals along the interior walls of conventos and churches.40 Contemporary art historians recognize complex references to indigenous culture embedded in the supposedly Christian themes of these paintings.41 In the late sixteenth century, the Third Mexican Provincial Council—an ecclesiastical meeting convened in 1585 and known as the Mexican Trent because it promulgated the Tridentine reforms—decreed that these murals be obscured by whitewash.42 Many indigenous murals remained whitewashed until the twentieth century.43 A similar blending of cultures emerges in the Christianization of amantecayotl, (indigenous feather art), the most famous extant colonial example being the Mass of St. Gregory (1539), based on a popular European

40  Rather than paint in red and black, traditional Mesoamerican colors, tlacuilos used only black on white walls, replicating the European prints that served as their models, transposing the images as if they were pressing the print against the wall. Personal communication, Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank. March 26, 2018. 41  One of the best resources for nonspecialists desiring more knowledge about the blending of indigenous cultures into the art and architecture of the Americas is the growing collection of videos available at SmartHistory (smarthistory.org/tag/new-spain/), which has paired with Khan Academy to offer essays and videos geared toward high schoolers exploring the Viceroyalties of New Spain, Peru, and Granada. See also the foundational work of Manuel Toussaint, George Kubler, and John McAndrews, as well more recent scholars such as Jaime Lara, Samuel Edgerton, Eleanor Wake, and Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank. 42  The so-called Tridentine reforms are products of the Council of Trent (1545–1563), an ecumenical meeting convened by the Roman Catholic Church in response to the Protestant Reformation. Several New World prelates attended the sessions of Trent. 43  Whereas some colonial Mexican clerics feared native peoples might worship the indigenous imagery, ideas, or deities embedded within convento art, by the late sixteenth century others believed the friars had failed in their evangelizing efforts and repurposed the space for other didactic applications. For an analysis of how convento mural programs differed along the northern frontier, see Robert H. Jackson’s Conflict and Conversion in Sixteenth Century Central Mexico: The Augustinian War on and Beyond the Chichimeca Frontier (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

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print.44 In this piece—which re-creates the moment during one of Pope Gregory’s liturgies when Christ appeared on the altar as evidence of his divine presence in the Eucharist—amanteca (native feather artists) incorporated items from the Americas, such as pineapples, alongside the Arma Christi, or implements of Christ’s Passion.45

Christian Education and Translation Education best exemplifies the reciprocal relationship fueling the development of indigenous Christianities. From the earliest days of colonial rule, the mendicants established schools to train the sons of indigenous nobles in European letters and faith, men known as teopantlaca.46 These schools— the most famous being el Colegio de Santiago Tlatelolco, outside modern Mexico City—produced a Nahua elite, drawing praise from friars and criticism from opponents threatened by the depths of indigenous knowledge.47 For their part, many friars excelled at linguistic studies, becoming conversant in the native languages of their pupils. Students fluent in Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl became invaluable collaborators with the mendicants in the production of indigenous-language catechetical texts. Colonial friars relied on trilingual indigenous aides as translators, thus enabling Nahuas to infuse Christian texts with their own cultural understanding. Analyses of these catechisms provide rich insight into native interpretations of Christianity in various periods and regions in New Spain.48 One of the most important works to emerge from the  Today preserved in France’s Musee d’Auch, its plumes retain much of their brilliance after nearly 500 years. Featherworks were highly prized in the early colonial period. For an excellent overview, see Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank’s “Featherworks: The Mass of St. Gregory” (www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-americas/new-spain/viceroyalty-new-spain/a/ featherworks-the-mass-of-st-gregory). 45  Amanteca were revered precontact specialists. In Tenochtitlan, they lived in Amantla, their own neighborhood, today known as the Barrio de San Miguel Amantla in Azcapotzalco, one of sixteen municipios (municipalities) in Mexico City. 46  Teopantlaca derives from teopan (god-place) and tlacatl (people), hence, people-of-thegod-place, or church people, meant more for educated Christians than those who attended or worked in a church. Townsend, Annals of Native America, xvii and 63. 47  In this school, students lived in community, wore cassocks, and studied Latin, reading, writing, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, music, art, indigenous medicine. Robert Ricard tells of an indigenous graduate so familiar with Latin he conversed easily in this foreign tongue on his deathbed with his confessor. See Ricard, Spiritual Conquest, 221–223. 48  See especially Mark Christensen, Translated Christianities: Nahuatl and Maya Religious Texts. Latin American Originals (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 44

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c­ ollaboration between these global indigenous Christians and friars is the 12-volume ethnographic study of Mesoamerican culture known as the Florentine Codex, overseen by Franciscan fray Bernardino de Sahagún.49

Parish Hierarchy Given the paucity of friars in the early colonial period, elite indigenous men served as appointed members of parish hierarchy, responsible for supervising matters of faith and organizing the community’s religious festivals around the church calendar. The most important official was the fiscal; instructed in Spanish, he managed the parish in the priest’s absence, served as a lay catechist, monitored Mass attendance, and maintained sacramental records.50 Other positions included sacristanes (sacristans), who supervised church maintenance and together with the maestros de capilla (chapel choirmasters), translated prayers and hymns into native languages. Choirmasters— and occasionally singers and musicians—often enjoyed tribute exemption and a modest salary.51 Prominent in their communities as representatives of the Church and Crown, native elites played a significant role in developing devotional practices reflecting local Mesoamerican tradition.

2014), Elizabeth Hill Boone, Louise Burkhart, and David Tavárez, Painted Words: Nahua Catholicism, Politics, and Memory in the Atzaqualco Pictorial Catechism (Studies in PreColumbian Art and Archeology Number Thirty-Nine. Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2017), and Jonathon Truitt, Sustaining the Divine in Mexico Tenochtitlan: Nahuas and Catholicism 1523–1700 (Academy of American Franciscan History/University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). 49  The Florentine Codex remains a rich resource for studying fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury Nahua (especially Mexican) culture and history. Sahagún labored on this project from 1545 until his death in 1590, the proper name for which is Historia universal de las cosas de Nueva España. As Camilla Townsend remarks, “highly educated by world standards… [these young indigenous aides] envisioned themselves as existing in relation to other peoples of the globe” (Annals of Native America, 110). Peter Villella argues that colonial indigenous intellectuals partnered with creoles to develop modern-day neo-Aztec Mexican identity. See Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 50  Historian Miriam Melton-Villanueva identifies this system as fiscalía. See The Aztecs at Independence: Nahua Culture Makers in Central Mexico, 1799–1832 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016). 51  Native salaries did not compare to the wages received by choir members in Europeanserving parishes.

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Cofradías Nahuas further influenced the development of local Christianity via cofradías, voluntary organizations dedicated to a Catholic saint or devotion responsible for sponsoring public religious celebrations associated with their patron.52 Open even to children, cofradías offered women an opportunity to assume the role of spiritual leader. The confraternity treasury, to which members contributed yearly dues, funded its activities, paid for members’ funerals, sponsored Masses for the souls of the departed, or purchased investment properties or cattle ranches. Members cared for images in  local churches, manufactured priestly vestments and processional platforms, and tended to one another’s spiritual and physical needs, especially widows and orphans.53 Though established and managed by the Catholic Church, cofradías provided Nahua communities latitude in developing and directing local ritual, organizing their own religious festivals, and providing indigenous spiritual leadership.

Conclusion Faced with unimaginable upheaval wrought by Iberian invasion, native peoples displayed incredible resilience in partnering with their mendicant teachers, taking on catechetical positions within their communities, translating Christian theology into their own languages, navigating Iberian bureaucratic procedures, capitalizing on existing tensions between colonial officials and clerics, planning extravagant religious celebrations, painting their culture into murals, and constructing lavish churches and friaries imbued with their own sacred. Christianity in Latin America was not a static imposition of Mediterranean Catholicism, but rather a collaborative enterprise resulting in a variety of indigenous Christianities. Archives Consulted AGI: Archivo General de las Indias (Sevilla) AGMP: Archivo General Municipal de Puebla (Puebla, México) AGN: Archivo General de la Nación (México, D.F.)

 Modern renditions of these organizations exist today in Mexico.  Caring for images and sweeping the temple were Mesoamerican traditions.

52 53

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Bibliography Boone, Elizabeth Hill. Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000) ———, Louise Burkhart, and David Tavárez. Painted Words: Nahua Catholicism, Politics, and Memory in the Atzaqualco Pictorial Catechism. Studies in Pre-­ Columbian Art and Archeology Number 39 (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2017) Cabral, Ignacio, Arquitectura religiosa en San Pedro Cholula, Puebla (Puebla: Universidad de las Americas-Puebla, 1994) Cervantes, Fernando. The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) Christensen, Mark. Translated Christianities: Nahuatl and Maya Religious Texts. Latin American Originals (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014) Cortés, Hernando. Hernán Cortés: Letters from Mexico. Translated by Anthony Pagden. Revised ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986) de Alva, J.  Jorge Klor. “Spiritual Conflict and Accommodation in New Spain: Towards a Typology of Aztec Responses to Christianity.” The Inca and Aztec States, 1400–1800: Anthropology and History, ed. George A Collier, et  al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982) de la Maza, Francisco. La ciudad de Cholula y sus iglesias, Vol. IX, Estudios y fuentes del arte en México (México, D.  F.: Universidad nacional autónoma de México, 1959) Elliott, J.H., Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) ———. Imperial Spain: 1469–1716 (New York: New American Library, 1963) González-Hermosillo, Francisco, ed. Gobierno y economía en los pueblos indios del México colonial (México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional del Antropología e Historia, 2001) Gutiérrez, Verónica A. Converting a Sacred City: Franciscan Re-Imagining of Sixteenth-Century San Pedro Cholula (PhD Dissertation, UCLA, 2012): https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56h8453h Jackson, Robert H. Conflict and Conversion in Sixteenth Century Central Mexico: The Augustinian War on and Beyond the Chichimeca Frontier (Leiden: Brill, 2013) Lara, Jaime. Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008) ———. City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004) León-Portilla, Miguel. “Testimonios nahuas sobre la conquista espiritual.” Estudios de cultura náhuatl 11 (1974): 11–36

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Lockhart, James. The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992) ——— and Enrique Otte. Letters and People of the Spanish Indies, Sixteenth Century, Cambridge Latin American Studies (Cambridge; New  York: Cambridge University Press, 1976) López de Gómara, Francisco. Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary. Translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964) Melton-Villanueva, Miriam. The Aztecs at Independence: Nahua Culture Makers in Central Mexico, 1799–1832 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016) Morales Valerio, OFM, Francisco. “Fray Pedro de Gante. Libro de colores es tu corazón.” Misioneros de la primera hora. Grandes evangelizadores del Nuevo Mundo. ed. Romeo Ballán, (Lima: Editorial “Sin Fronteras” 1991); Enciclopedia Franciscana: (www.franciscanos.org/enciclopedia/pgante.html) ———. “The Native Encounter with Christianity: Franciscans and Nahuas in Sixteenth-Century Mexico.” The Americas, Vol. 65, No. 2 (October 2008), 137–159 Motolinía, Toribio Benavente. History of the Indians of New Spain [1541]. Translated by Francis Borgia Steck O.F.M. (Washington DC: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1951) Nesvig, Martin Austin. Local Religion in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006) Oroz Pedro, Gerónimo de Mendieta, Francisco Suárez, and Fidel de Jesús Chauvet. Relación de la descripción de la Provincia del Santo Evangelio: que es en las Indias Occidentales que llaman la Nueva España: hecha en el año de 1585 [1585]. Nueva ed. (México D.F.: Imprenta Mexicana de Juan Aguilar Reyes, 1947) Padden, Robert, “The Ordenanza de Patronazgo of 1574: An Interpretive Essay.” The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History 12 (1956) Pardo, Osvaldo. The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004) Pohl, John M.  D. Exploring Mesoamerica. Places in Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) Poole, C.M., Stafford. “The Declining Image of the Indian among Churchmen in Sixteenth-Century New Spain.” Indian-Religious Relations in Colonial Spanish America, ed. Susan E. Ramírez (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989) Restall, Matthew, Lisa Sousa, and Kevin Terraciano, Mesoamerican Voices: Native-­ Language Writings from Colonial Mexico, Oaxaca, Yucatan, and Guatemala (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

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Ricard, Robert. The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572. Translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966) Schroeder, Susan, ed. Native Resistance and the Pax Colonial in New Spain (Linguistics and Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998) ——— and Stafford Poole, ed. Religion in New Spain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007) Sobre el modo de tributar los indios de Nueva España a Su Majestad, 1561–1564 (México, D.F.: José Porrúa e Hijos, Sucs., 1958) Tavárez, Davíd, ed. Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017) Townsend, Camilla. Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) Truitt, Jonathon. Sustaining the Divine in Mexico Tenochtitlan: Nahuas and Catholicism 1523–1700 (Academy of American Franciscan History/University of Oklahoma Press, 2018) Turley, Steve. Franciscan Spirituality and Mission in New Spain, 1524–1599: Conflict Beneath the Sycamore Tree (Luke 19:1–10) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014) Villella, Peter. “Indian Lords, Hispanic Gentlemen: The Salazars of Colonial Mexico.” The Americas 69, no. 1 (2012): 1–36 ———. Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

CHAPTER 7

Iglesia Autóctona: An Indigenous Response to Colonial Christianity Michel Andraos

Introduction This chapter is about a response to colonial Christianity in a region that has become a symbol of Indigenous resistance at the political, social, and ecclesial levels: San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. It’s quite a historical coincidence that one of the first dioceses in the Americas in a city named after Bartolomé de Las Casas, its first active bishop, has become a name associated in our time with a radical Indigenous rebellion and resistance movements. Thanks to its Indigenous majority, this local Roman Catholic Church has been since the mid-1970s challenging the old

The English translation of iglesia autóctona is “autochthonous church.” But given the particular contextual meaning of the original concept of iglesia autóctona, which I will discuss below, I chose to use the term in Spanish all through this chapter. All translations from the Spanish are by the author, unless indicated otherwise. M. Andraos (*) Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_7

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colonial theology and church by constructing an alternative way of being a church of and with Indigenous peoples. The following pages present a brief version of the story of the emergence of an iglesia autóctona, a local church with Indigenous face and heart in this diocese, told from an historical perspective through an outsider’s eyes. It is a story about how this local church has been facing its colonial reality and trying to transform itself over the past few decades. The new transformation entails a radical shift away from perpetuating the colonial experience in which the church has been dealing with the Indigenous people as objects of its pastoral charity and evangelization by trying to assimilate them into its ecclesial structures, belief systems, and practices that have been since the conquest—and continue to be today— foreign to their ways of life. It is ultimately the story of the struggle of the Indigenous people in the church to transform the colonial ecclesial structures that have often justified and actively contributed to their dispossession, cultural genocide, and subjugation. All over the Americas, the main demand of Indigenous peoples, inside and outside the churches, is decolonization: decolonization of their lands, ways of life and being, and the demand of their right to self-determination and freedom. With only a few exceptions, most churches from the different versions of mainline Christianities have been, and continue to be, part of the colonial project and structures of the coloniality of power (colonialidad del poder).1 I argue in this chapter that the emergent iglesia autóctona and 1  For an explanation of “coloniality of power,” see the two introductory articles by the main theorist of the concept, Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America,” International Sociology 15 (2000): 215–52, https://doi.org/10.1177/026 8580900015002005; and “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2/3 (March 2007): 168–78, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353. Two chapters in this volume are particularly relevant to my discussion here. The chapter by Enrique Dussel on “Epistemological Decolonization of Theology” provides an excellent background for this discussion. In a way, this chapter is a case study in conversation with Dussel’s broader framework. See also the chapter by Sylvia Marcos on Indigenous women’s spirituality. Particularly relevant to my discussion in this chapter are the section on Indigenous peoples, Catholicism, and colonization, and the section on decolonizing epistemology. For a general introduction to coloniality from a theological perspective, see the two articles by Lee Cormie, “Decoloniality: A Conceptual Introduction,” in Decoloniality and Justice: Theological Perspectives, ed. Jean-François Roussel, World Forum on Theology and Liberation (São Leopoldo, Brazil: Oikos, 2018), 19–21; and “Expanding Decolonial Horizons: Implications for the Renewal of Theology,” ibid, 51–64. See also in the same publication, Michel Andraos et al., “Glossary of Key Terms [Modernity, Coloniality, Decolonial Turn, Pensamiento Único],” 22–24.

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teología india, or rather iglesias autóctonas and teologías indias, are manifestations of resistance to colonization within the churches. These movements represent today a deep hope and force for decolonization and transformation of the churches, their structures, and traditional theologies. Moreover, these movements open decolonial spaces in the same religious structures that have historically been used as the main instrument and force of their colonization, and where coloniality is still pervasive today. For the most part, I believe that the churches remain ignorant of the deep implications of their historical and continued role in the ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples, and the many ways the churches reproduce coloniality in their ecclesial structures, religious practices, and theologies. The first part of this chapter will discuss the broader ecclesial context in which the experience of iglesia autóctona and teología india emerged in the diocese of San Cristóbal. In the second part, I will outline the origins of their emergence around the mid 1970s and then briefly discuss the stages of their development. In the last part, I will discuss the challenges and opportunities these decolonial movements present to theology and ecclesial structures for their transformation. This chapter builds on research I have been doing for many years. I have written several articles on this and similar topics that I will make reference to in the following pages. When I was invited by the editors to contribute to this volume, I could not think of a better topic that would make a clear point about the colonial implication of Christianity and the emergence of Indigenous decolonial ecclesial and theological responses. On a personal note, I am not an Indigenous person, and I am not from the diocese of San Cristóbal. I have however experienced colonial Christianity first hand in a different context, my native Middle East. The two experiences are by no means commensurable, yet they share some elements in common that inform my analysis, understanding, and insights in relation to Western colonial “evangelization.” I am primarily writing this chapter as a theologian who has been studying the pastoral process of the diocese San Cristóbal for more than two decades. I do this academic study from a position of solidarity and friendship with several individuals and organizations in this diocese. In collaboration with some pastoral and educational institutions in San Cristóbal, I travel there regularly and organize study trips for graduate students of theology, theologians, and church leaders on intercultural theological learning. For me personally, the important theological lessons learned in this place over the past almost 25 years are invaluable. I am deeply indebted to this local church for an important part of my theological knowledge, education, and transformation. And I am still learning.

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Background and Context The relationship between the Christian churches and Indigenous peoples in the Americas went through significant change during the second half of the twentieth century. In the case of the Roman Catholic Church, which is the main focus of this chapter, one can point to the positive development that evolved after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). The church began to rethink its mission in a way that is respectful of peoples’ different cultures and attentive to the issues of poverty, justice, oppression, and colonization. However, it was not until the Latin America bishops’ conference in Medellín (CELAM) in 1968 that the church in Latin America began to pay attention to the historical failure of its relationship with the Indigenous peoples of the continent and the need to seriously rethink its mission theology and pastoral practice.2 Several regional church consultation meetings at a Latin American level took place shortly before and after Medellín to discuss a new pastoral approach to working with Indigenous peoples.3 Some scholars point to the early 1970s as an important turning point in that relationship. Theologian Víctor Madrigal Sánchez, among many others, points out that one of the specific important turning points was the meeting in Barbados in 1971 of a group of anthropologists and the statement issued after their meeting that is known as “The Declaration of Barbados for the Liberation of the Indians.” The anthropologists present 2  See, for example, the paper presented at the Medellín conference by Bishop Samuel Ruiz García, “Evangelization in Latin America,” in The Church in the Present-Day Transformation of Latin America in the Light of the Council, Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops, I, Position Papers (Bogotá: General Secretariat of CELAM, 1970), 155–77. Samuel Ruiz García was bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas from 1960 to 2000. The movements discussed in this chapter, in which he played a leading role, took place in the diocese during his tenure. 3  Nicanor Sarmiento documents these meetings that took place in Ambato (1967), Melgar (1968), Caracas (1969), Xicotepec (1970), Iquitos (1971), and Manaus (1977) and gives a summary of their outcome. See Nicanor Sarmiento Tupayupanqui, “La Evangelizacion de los Pueblos Indigenas en los Documentos del Episcopado Latinoamericano,” September 2007, accessible online at http://www.inculturacion.net/phocadownload/Autores_invitados/Sarmiento,_Evangelizacion_indigenas_en_documentos_episcopado_latinoamericano. pdf. (Accessed May 12, 2018). See also on the same topic the chapter by Stephen P. Judd, “The Indigenous Theology Movement in Latin America: Encounters of Memory, Resistance, and Hope at the Crossroads,” in Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change, ed. Edward L. Cleary and Timothy J. Steigenga (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 210–30.

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at this meeting concluded that the Christian churches and missions, along with the states, are co-responsible for the continuing colonization of Indigenous peoples.4 This statement had an impact on many local churches. In relation to the diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Jorge Santiago notes that shortly after the Barbados declaration in support of the liberation of Indigenous peoples, several meetings took place between anthropologists and pastoral workers, both in Chiapas and the rest of Mexico. Bishop Ruiz, along with anthropologist Andrés Aubry, who worked closely with him and the pastoral agents of the diocese since the early 1970s, participated in many of these meetings. According to Santiago, these meetings had a significant influence on Ruiz’s new understanding of culture and the subsequent development of his mission theology, which eventually led to rethinking the relation of the church to Indigenous peoples.5 Madrigal Sánchez argues that the meeting of the Department of Missions of CELAM at Iquitos in 1971 that took place shortly after the Barbados Declaration became a moment of repentance and of taking responsibility for “undermining Indigenous cultures and the attitude of spiritual conquest.”6 Since that time, notes Madrigal Sánchez, we begin to see the emergence of new processes of “pastoral indígena” that “assume the cause of the struggle of Indigenous peoples for preserving the cultural values, identity, and especially the struggle for their rights to land and autonomy, and for the protection of territorial resources.”7 These struggles that were already taking place in many parts of the continent on the social and political levels began to also be part of the pastoral concern of some local churches. An important quote by bishop Samuel Ruiz ­reflecting on this historical moment captures this shift in approach to pastoral ministry. Ruiz said: 4  See Víctor Madrigal Sánchez, “Interpelaciones desde las Teologías Originarias a la Teología Cristiana,” in La Teología de La Liberación En Prospectiva. Congreso Continental de Teología, São Leopoldo, Brazil, October 7–11, 2012, vol. 2 (Montevideo, Uruguay: Fundación Amerindia, 2012), 131–42. The “Declaration of Darbados” is published in a document by the International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), Copenhagen, Denmark. According to the IWGIA document, the symposium of the anthropologists was sponsored jointly by the Program to Combat Racism and the Churches Commission on International Affairs of the World Council of Churches, together with the Ethnology Department of the University of Berne, Switzerland. 5  Jorge Santiago Santiago, paper presented at the First International Colloquium in memory of anthropologist Andrés Aubry in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, December 2007, www. coloquiointernacionalandresaubry.org/aubry.html. (Accessed May 12, 2018). 6  Madrigal Sánchez, “Interpelaciones desde las Teologías Originarias,” 132. 7  Madrigal Sánchez, “Interpelaciones desde las Teologías Originarias,” 133.

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I believe this is the process we are in at the moment and it is irreversible: that is, the Indigenous peoples will continue to become subjects and this will perhaps lead to even more conflictive situations which would only make this process stronger; this is what I mean by irreversible. The Indigenous and the poor have realized that they can influence history, that they are not only victims of history but are also able to transform the history which others have imposed on them, and that they have to not only resist the negative side of this history, but also to generate a new world for themselves and take responsibility for their concrete situation. I believe this is where the future is leading us. This is at the same time a path, a perspective, and an aspiration.8

Until the 1970s then, as will be discussed in more detail below, there was no clear evidence of challenge from within the ecclesial structures and practices to the dominant pastoral approach that was still primarily focused on the assimilation of Indigenous Christians into the Latin American version of Western style Roman Catholicism.9 In this assimilationist pastoral approach, Indigenous cultures and spiritual practices were neither acknowledged as valuable nor respected, and there was no pastoral imagination or example for dealing with cultural and religious differences within the ecclesial structures. Since the conquest of the Americas, the spiritual and cultural practices of Indigenous peoples for the most part were demonized and either assimilation into the dominant Western version of Christianity or eradication, by force when necessary, were their only options. Despite some positive shifts that began to take place in the early 1970s, and even with the emergence of the inculturation theologies during that period, assimilation and paternalism continued to be the dominant features of the approaches, by the churches as well as by the states, in the Americas and beyond. Christian pastoral work among Indigenous peoples continues to the present day to be for the most part deeply marked by colonial theological attitudes. The theological and pastoral attempts at decolonizing theologies and pastoral ministries by Indigenous peoples and pastoral agents in solidarity with them are often faced by resistance from ecclesial authorities. 8  Michel Andraos, ed. and trans., Seeking Freedom: Bishop Samuel Ruiz in Conversation with Jorge S. Santiago on Time and History, Prophecy, Faith and Politics, and Peace (Toronto, Canada: Toronto Council, Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace, 1999), 20–21. 9  Samuel Ruiz makes this point clearly on several occasions. See Jean Meyer, Samuel Ruiz En San Cristóbal (Mexico City: Tusquetes, 2000), 139–141.

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Exceptions to this approach are rare despite the many declarations of good intentions in the official teachings and statements of many churches, which leads to raising a central question in relation to the theme of this chapter: Is a truly decolonial ecclesiology, not in theory but also in praxis, possible? If yes, how do we explain the scarcity of such examples? Is a decolonial church, particularly in relation to the Indigenous peoples, an oxymoron?

The Emergence of an Iglesia Autóctona10 The emergence of a decolonial Indigenous local church and theology I reflect on in this chapter is based on the articulation by their local actors.11 The movements of iglesia autóctona and teología india maya cristiana in the diocese of San Cristóbal since the mid 1970s are part of growing pastoral and theological Indigenous movements that are, according to their protagonists, responses to the colonial theology and to ecclesial practices that, as noted above, are still ongoing in the churches. They are movements of spiritual and theological resistance that are not unrelated to other forms of Indigenous social and political resurgence for freedom, land, and self-determination that are widespread all over the Americas. In the particular case of Chiapas, the Zapatista uprising which began on January 1, 1994 and the following movement of autonomous municipalities and local Indigenous governance in the areas of political representation, social organization, education, and economy of solidarity, and so on is just one example. The movements of iglesia autóctona and teología india echo what has been happening in society at large outside the churches and are in this sense part of the broader Indigenous resurgences.12 10  I have discussed this topic in more detail in Michel Andraos, “Indigenous Leadership in  the  Church: The  Experience of  the  Diocese of  San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico,” Toronto Journal of  Theology 21, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 57–65. This section of the chapter is an updated summary that builds on revised previous work. 11  A recent version of this story is told in the two chapters by Tzeltal theologian Pedro Gutiérrez Jiménez, “Indigenous Theology: A Journey of Decolonizing the Heart,” and diocesan pastoral leader and theologian Jorge Santiago Santiago, “A Fifty-Years’ Perspective: The Experience of Accompaniment in the Process of Dialogue-Encounter with the Indigenous Peoples in Chiapas, Mexico,” in Michel Andraos, ed. The Church and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas: In-between Reconciliation and Decolonization. Studies in World Catholicism, Vol. 7. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019). Both Gutiérrez Jiménez and Santiago Santiago have been part of these movements since their inception. 12  On the struggle of the Zapatista communities for autonomy and good life with justice and dignity, see the excellent recent work by Mariana Mora, Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous

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The teología india movement is intertwined with the emergence of the iglesia autóctona. Both emerged as a result of intercultural theological dialogue within this local Catholic church. While not unrelated to the broader Mayan spiritual and religious practices and revival that exist independently from Christianity in the Mayan regions of southern Mexico and Guatemala, the teología india is one of several outcomes of this new dialogue between traditional Christian theologies and the practices of Indigenous Christians who are of Mayan origin, or who live according to modern interpretations of Mayan Indigenous traditions. Through dialogue between the different spiritual worlds they inhibit and embody, and the different worldviews they bring together in their way of life as they reconcile the religions of “Nuestro Padre que está en el cielo” and “nuestra Madre que es la tierra,”13 these Indigenous communities create spaces of intercultural theological dialogue within their Christian communities and churches. While these movements of theological and spiritual dialogues with Indigenous religious traditions and experiences are new phenomena, they have however been fundamental for the emergence of different forms of iglesias autóctonas in many places.14 Indigenous theologians have Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). The Tzeltal concept kuxlejal, which translates broadly to “full life in justice and dignity” and is often translated in Spanish as “buen vivir,” is a central theme in the teología india movement as well as for the political Indigenous resistance movements in Chiapas, as Mora’s publication very clearly demonstrates. 13  See interview with Jan de Vos “Chiapas, El Camino de Un Pueblo.” Ixtus 26 (1999): 23. De Vos is a prominent historian of the missionary movements in Chiapas since the early colonial times. In the following quotation from the interview, I believe he summarizes well what he believes are two fundamentally different religious world views and ways of life. According to de Vos, Christianity brought and imposed a God who is a “Father in heaven,” while for the Mayan people, God is “Corazón del Cielo - Corazón de la Tierra,” heaven and earth together. “Nuestro Padre que está en el cielo y nuestra Madre que es la tierra,” … expresa de manera muy llamativa esta profunda diferencia entre dos maneras de ver la vida, de vivirla, de relacionarse con la naturaleza, con lo divino o con el más allá, de relacionarse también entre ellos. (“Our Father who are in heaven and our Mother who is the earth,” … express very strikingly a profound difference between two ways of looking at life, living, relating to nature, with the divine or the ultimate, and also relating among each other.) 14  The movement of the Mayan teología india recently celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. See Coordinación Ecuménica de Teología India Mayense, El Aroma de Las Flores En La Milpa Mayense: Ofrenda de Nuestro Caminar Teológico. 25 Años de Los Encuentros Ecuménicos de Teologı-a India Mayense. (San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico: Coordinación Ecuménica de Teología India Mayense, 2016). On other experiences of iglesia autóctona in the continent, see Víctor Corral Mantilla, “Evangelización Inculturada e Iglesia Autóctona desde la Experiencia de la Iglesia Particular de Riobamba en Ecuador,” in 50 Jubileo Episcopal

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already reflected ­systematically on these new experiences.15 The experience in the diocese of San Cristóbal in this area got more attention than other places primarily because it already  started in the mid 1970s and has  become more theologically  developed  and advanced. It might have possibly gotten the attention of many theologians possibly because of the Vatican’s opposition to this process since the mid 1990s.16 Also, another reason for this attention could be that the development of this local iglesia autóctona is happening within the already mentioned broader context of an Indigenous rebellion, which became internationally well known since January of 1994 as the Zapatista uprising.17 Both the Indigenous political movements of resistance and the movements of teología india and iglesia autóctona, while are not the same and do not agree on all issues, they nevertheless share the common struggle for decolonization and self-determination. de Don Samuel Ruiz García. Congreso Teologico Pastoral. Ponencias, ed. Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas (San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas: Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, 2010), 79–92. 15  Just to give an example of one theologian, see the following selected works by Eleazar López Hernández, a key theological voice in this movement, Teología India: Antología (Cochabamba, Bolivia: Verbo Divino, 2000). “Teologías Indígenas en las Iglesias Cristianas. ¿Podemos los Indígenas Ganar en Ellas el Lugar que Merecemos?,” in La Teología de la Liberación en Prospectiva. Congreso Continental de Teología, São Leopoldo, Brazil, October 7–11, 2012, vol. 2 (Montevideo, Uruguay: Fundación Amerindia, 2012), 293–306; “El Parto de una Iglesia Autóctona entre Indígenas de Chiapas,” in 50 Jubileo Episcopal de Don Samuel Ruiz García. Congreso Teologico Pastoral. Ponencias, ed. Diócese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas (San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas: Diócese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, 2010), 55–68; “Teología Desde los Nombres Indígenas de Dios,” in V Simposio de Theología India: Revelación de Dios y Pueblos Originarios, ed. Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano— CELAM, Departamento de Cultura y Educación (Bogotá, Colombia: CELAM, 2015), 43–66. Several regional and continental meetings of theologians of teología india have taken place since the early 1990s. The papers presented at these meetings are published in several volumes. See, for example, “Teología India: Primer Encuentro Taller Latinoamericano, Mexico (Mexico, September 16–23, 1990)” (CENAMI, 1991); and “Sabiduria Indígena, Fuente de Esperanza, Teología India, II Parte, III Encuentro-Taller Latinoamericano, Cochabamba, Bolivia, 24 Al 30 de Agosto de 1997” (Cusco, Peru: IPA, IDEA, and CTP, 1998). 16  On the tension with the Vatican, see my articles “Indigenous Leadership in the Church,” 61–62; and “¿Por Qué Una Visita a Chiapas? El Papa Francisco y Los Pueblos Indígenas,” Spiritus 57/3, no. 224 (September 2016): 118–27. 17  The relation between the Zapatista uprising and the pastoral process in the diocese of San Cristóbal has been discussed in numerous books and articles. The works of the historian Jan de Vos, cited above, are particularly helpful. Another good study on this topic is Meyer, Samuel Ruiz En San Cristóbal, cited earlier.

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Among the earliest formal diocesan statement on iglesia autóctona is the 1975 Christmas message in which bishop Samuel Ruiz announced with great joy the birth of an iglesia autóctona in the diocese.18 He said: Christ has been born among us: he has a Tzeltal face, a Chol face, a Tzotzil face; he became Indigenous and lives in our midst. This is the good news of our Christmas: one hundred indigenous pre-deacons are a sign of the birth of an autochthonous Church.19

In the context of the diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in the mid 1970s, this announcement was not just a symbolic gesture of cultural inclusion or inculturation. It rather had a deeper significance and reflected a structural change this local church was going through. A convergence of several factors starting in the early 1970s, some already briefly discussed above, led this diocese not only to a new cultural awareness but also to taking responsibility for its colonial history as well as its present colonial reality. The new structural ecclesial changes were intended to open new possibilities for a different relationship with Indigenous peoples that would in the following decades have an impact on the church in other parts of Latin America and beyond. At least four factors converged during that period that prepared the way for this significant ecclesial structural change. First, the political and cultural resurgence that was taking place among Indigenous peoples across the Americas. In Chiapas, one concrete illustration of this resurgence was the meeting of the First Indigenous Congress that took place in the city of San Cristóbal in October 1974.20 A significant number of representatives from the four largest ethnic communities in the diocese (Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Chol, and Tzotzil) met from October 14–16 to discuss their situation. 18  Bishop Samuel Ruiz has discussed the topic iglesia autóctona in several writings and interviews. See, for example, Samuel Ruiz García, Mi Trabajo Pastoral En La Diócesis de San Cristóbal de Las Casas: Principios Teológicos (Mexico City: Ediciones Paulinas, 1999), 113–129; and Samuel Ruiz and Carles Torner, Cómo Me Convirtieron los Indígenas (Matiaño, Spain: SalTerrae, 2003), 91–107. See also Meyer, Samuel Ruiz En San Cristóbal, 131–153. 19  Samuel Ruiz, “La Iglesia no es Católica si no es Tzeltal,” in Signos de Lucha y Esperenza: Testimonios de la Iglesia en América Latina 1973–1978, Lima: CEP, 1978, 316. 20  For a more detailed discussion on the First Indigenous Congress, see Andraos, “Indigenous Leadership in the Church,” 58–59. For a historical documentary summary of the event, see Jesús Morales Bermúdez, “El Congreso Indígena de Chiapas,” in Anuario 1991 del Instituto Chiapaneco de Cultura (n.p.: Gobierno del Estado de Chiapas, Instituto Chiapaneco de Cultura, 1992), 242–370.

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“We wanted,” they said, “to make our unity our strength … say our word … walk in freedom.” Observers note that it was the first time since the conquest that delegates from these four ethnic groups met together to discuss the problems that caused their common suffering.21 A second factor, which is internal to the Catholic Church worldwide and particularly in Latin America, is the impact of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) and the subsequent second Latin American Bishops conference in Medellín, Colombia (1968). The outcome of both events opened a new horizon for local churches to engage their context, take the social, cultural, and historical experience of their people seriously, rethink their pastoral ministry and mission, and become open to creative and more meaningful ways of being a church in their world. The diocesan documents from the 1970s to the present make reference to these two ecclesial events, Vatican II and Medellín, as key historical moments and turning points. The documents from both events called on and encouraged local churches worldwide to become socially engaged and in service of their world, and to particularly take the cause of social justice seriously as an integral part of mission and evangelization. Several Vatican II documents call for respecting local cultural expressions of Catholic faith and dialogue with cultures and religions. The document Ad Gentes, frequently quoted in diocesan documents in support of the pastoral process of the diocese, envisioned the establishment of particular autochthonous churches (iglesias autóctonas).22 A third factor is the new awareness of the relationship between the mission of the church and the destruction of Indigenous peoples and their  Carlos Fazio, Samuel Ruiz, El Caminante, (Mexico City: Espasa Calpe, 1994), 103.  See Second Vatican Council, Ad Gentes, 6. It would be important to comment though that based on the more recent experience of iglesia autóctona among the Indigenous communities, the theological reflections discussed in this chapter expand the meaning of the term beyond its use in Ad Gentes. The decolonial dimension in the use of the term, for example, is an added reflection that was not discussed in the original Vatican document. The diocesan documents, such as pastoral plans and the Third Diocesan Synod, would argue that the current use of the term is in the spirit of its original use in the Vatican document. The documents of the III Diocesan Synod (1995–1999) define in the first section Iglesia autóctona as “a church that is rooted in the place where it is located, that realizes itself and develops assuming the local culture, and not a church that comes from outside, that belongs to another culture, and that only makes external adaptations.” See Diócesis de San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Plan Diocesano de Pastoral (Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, 2004), 23–30; and the text of the III Sinodo Diocesano [1995–1999], (Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, 2000), 15–36. 21 22

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cultures, discussed above. This awareness led to the realization of the failure of the ecclesial model in its pastoral and social mission as well as its way of retrying to impose a Western style church among the Indigenous peoples, not only in Chiapas but globally. The theology and ecclesiology of the church in relation to Indigenous peoples continues to be underdeveloped at a global level. Reflecting back on this new awareness, bishop Ruiz noted: Wherever the gospel was proclaimed to Indigenous people in the “New World,” with it came a new culture, namely the Western culture, and it was imposed on people as the only way of living the Christian faith. This imposition, therefore, created a real and visible cultural and religious schizophrenia with obvious symptoms among all the Native peoples in the continent. … We realized that their marginalization, poverty and misery were not the result of their free choice but rather were the result of a process in which we are involved and which we need to rethink.23

A fourth factor, which is related to the above quotation, is the awareness of the widespread systemic poverty, discrimination, and oppression, and the historic responsibility of the church in this regard. The First Indigenous Congress certainly contributed to making this clear in the context of Chiapas, which resulted in rethinking the pastoral action and process of the diocese. According to Dominican friar Pablo Iribarren, who documented the diocesan pastoral process, two questions articulated by the Indigenous communities became pressing in the mid 1970s: how to think of a new way of being a church among or with Indigenous peoples that is not an imposition of a Western colonial Christianity, and how to take responsibility for the social context seriously. Iribarren summarizes the questions of the Indigenous communities as follows: “How to live our faith, hope, love and freedom in a situation of economic, cultural, political and religious oppression?”24 Several pastoral meetings took place during that period among the Indigenous communities of the diocese to discuss the future vision of the local church. They wanted a church, they said, according to Iribarren, that is more incarnated in their history and identity as Tzeltal  Andraos, Seeking Freedom, 18–19.  Iribarren, Vino Nuevo, 12.

23 24

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people, in service of their communities, prophetic, emerging from within the Indigenous identity, and that helps in moving the people forward in their process of becoming subjects of their history. In the words of the Tzeltal people recorded by Iribarren: [We want] a Church that puts itself and its ministries in the service of the world. The raison d’être of the Church is not itself, but the construction and promotion of the Reign of God and its justice; [we desire] a prophetic Church, that emerges from the Indigenous identity, a Church that proclaims the gospel to its own members and that moves the people forward so that they become historic subject of their liberation.25

The late 1970s became a time in the diocese for rethinking the local ecclesiology drawing on themes that were central to the new vision of being a church that meets the aspirations of and accompanies the Indigenous communities. Iribarren comments that these were defining moments in the history of this local church and an opportunity for the emergence of diocesan ecclesial Indigenous leadership. As a result of listening to and accompanying the Indigenous communities, the elders of many communities gradually started taking ecclesial responsibilities and became the deacons and leaders of a newly emerging local church with an Indigenous face, an iglesia autóctona.26 This ecclesial evolution prepared the way for a process of theological articulation that followed and became known as teología india. What we mean by teología india, notes Tzeltal theologian Pedro Gutiérrez Jiménez, quoted above, is the set of religious experiences and knowledge that we Indian peoples possess and with which we explain our experience of faith, our harmonious relationships with others and with all of the cosmos.… These theologies have accompanied our origin and our civilization as peoples, have generated and fed our resistance against projects of conquest and colonization, and have accompanied today our resistance against the neoliberal system and fed our proposal of a more human and divine society for all. Our theologies seek

 Iribarren, Vino Nuevo, 14.  Iribarren, “Document from the Diocese of San Cristóbal,” quoted in Marina Patricia Jiménez Ramírez, “La Interacción Entre la Iglesia de la Diócesis de San Cristóbal y Los Procesos Sociales de las Comunidades Indígenas del Municipio de Pantelho, Chiapas,” thesis, (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), 1994) 102–103. 25 26

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to strengthen our heart so that we as peoples do not shrivel away under the power of the system of death.27

For Alicia Gómez, this theology is not new. Although its systematic articulation in the diocese is recent, the theology itself is centuries old. She asserts that the teología india “is about recovering how God has been journeying among the people, the presence of God in the ancient symbols, rites, myths, and wisdom of Indigenous people. The task of this theology is to discover the face and the heart of God in these experiences.”28 Gómez raises a central point for the intercultural, decolonial theological dialogue with Indigenous peoples. Until very recently, modern Western Christian theologies had a great difficulty recognizing the presence of God among other cultures and appreciating their diverse religious experiences that are different from Christianity, or that do not fit the colonial Western categories of Christian theologies. An intercultural theological dialogue with teología india in this sense becomes a decolonial turn.29 Madrigal Sánchez, quoted earlier, makes a similar argument and comments on the challenge of intercultural theological dialogue that the different experiences of teología india present to Christian theologies. He writes, Aboriginal theologies challenge Christianity to establish an intercultural dialogue in which the polyphony of voices with which people express their religious experiences is recognized. A condition to enter into this dialogue is to understand that Christianity is neither against nor above other ­experiences of faith, but on the side. Saying that Christianity is alongside other religious traditions does not mean, as we have already hinted, that all other paths converge in Christianity as if it were the only way to God.30

27  Pedro Gutiérrez Jiménez, “Flowers and Fruits of Our Maya-Christian Spirituality and Theology,” paper presented at the Latin American Congress on Religion and Ethnicity, Institute for Intercultural Studies and Research, San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, January 11, 2005. An English translation and a copy of the Spanish original were given to the author by Pedro Gutiérrez Jiménez. 28  Ruiz and Torner, Cómo Me Convirtieron los Indígenas, 78. 29  See the section on epistemic decolonial turn in Enrique Dussel, “Epistemological Decolonization of Theology,” Chap. 2 of this volume. 30  Madrigal Sánchez, “Interpelaciones desde las Teologías Originarias,” 142.

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While the various Christian experiences of teología india present a challenge to intercultural dialogue with mainline Christian theologies, Bolivian Aymara Chiquitano theologian Roberto Tomichá presents another argument in the same vein and emphasizes the epistemic colonial theological dimension. Tomichá argues that teología india – in tune with the post-conciliar Latin American theological tradition – listens, learns, discerns, dialogues with other academic disciplines that seek to understand the reality of human beings with methodologies that are more dialogical, integrated, complex, transdisciplinary, in order to self-­ critically overcome the epistemic coloniality and hermeneutics that are internalized in the same theological task.31

In other words, Tomichá points out the important contribution that the methodologies of teología india could make to undermine the epistemic coloniality of the dominant theologies, which continue to be for the most part Eurocentric. For many Indigenous theologians, this epistemic decolonization is central to doing teología india. Indigenous peoples under the Christian conquista have been denied their spiritual and wisdom ways of knowing, among many other things, and the different movements of teología india are precisely working at recovering and reviving what was denied, and that has resisted the Christian theological and religious conquest. Affirming the resistance to theological epistemic coloniality, Pedro Gutiérrez Jiménez speaks about teología india as a journey of decolonizing the heart, as well as the mind.32 Along with other Indigenous theologians, Gutiérrez Jiménez developed the notion of epistemology of the heart as part of a decolonial methodology for doing teología india. By epistemology of the heart Gutiérrez Jiménez means recovering the capacity to listen to the heart as a way of knowing, and to trust in the deep spiritual experience of the community and the ancestors, and honor their customs and ways of life and knowing.

31   Roberto Tomichá Charupá, “Revelación y Pueblos Originarios: Algunas Consideraciones,” in V Simposio de Teología India: Revelación de Dios y Pueblos Originarios, ed. CELAM – Departamento de Cultura y Educación (Bogotá: CELAM, 2015), 135. 32  Gutiérrez Jiménez, “Indigenous Theology: A Journey of Decolonizing the Heart.”

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Conclusion: Is a Decolonial Church an Oxymoron? The purpose of this chapter is not to give a systematic account of the development of the iglesia autóctona in Chiapas. In line with the scope of this volume, my intention was to do a broad, contextual reading using a decolonial lens to reflect on the alternative to the colonial ecclesial experience and theology in that particular local church. This chapter is also not intended to be a definitive reading of these movements but rather a theological reflection by an outsider engaged in solidarity with and learning from these decolonial theological movements. I raised above the question: “Can the colonial churches of Nuestro Padre que está en el cielo be transformed by the decolonial iglesias autóctonas of nuestra Madre que es la tierra?” Based on my reading of the experience discussed above, and of other similar experiences in the Americas and elsewhere, I am not totally convinced that this transformation is happening. Most of the theologians discussed above, I would argue, share the opinion that the construction of iglesias autóctonas continues to be a very challenging struggle in the traditional churches of mainline Christianities. The same is true for the Indigenous movements of self-determination in their relation with their respective nation-states, which, like the mainline churches, are the product of the same colonial modernity, and are part of the same web of colonial relationships with Indigenous peoples. I believe the lenses of coloniality of power and decolonial turn briefly discussed above shed some light for a deeper understanding of the colonial ecclesial structures and theologies.33 Enrique Dussel, in the conclusion of his chapter in this volume, affirms: “The epistemological decolonization of theology begins by situating ourselves in a new space from which it, as locus enuntiationis and original hermeneutic, will be necessary to redo theology as a whole.” I believe the evolving iglesias autóctonas and teologías indias discussed above offer such a space and possibility. There has been a noticeable openness in recent years in the Roman Catholic Church for dialogue with Indigenous peoples and learning from their wisdom. The orientation of the encyclical Laudato Si' by Pope Francis and its continuing effect point in that direction. Roberto Tomichá, 33  For a broader discussion of theology and decoloniality, see Jean-François Roussel, ed., Decoloniality and Justice: Theological Perspectives, World Forum on Theology and Liberation (São Leopoldo, Brazil: Oikos, 2018). See also Michel Andraos, “Les Églises, la Théologie et les Autochtones : De la Réconciliation à la Décolonisation,” Théologuiques 23, no. 2 (2015): 59–73.

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quoted above, comments on the theological challenges of an Amerindian church and theology.34 He argues: “From the beginning of time, many Amerindian peoples have lived and conceived reality as eminently relational. Everything has life, and everything is connected, human beings as well as other living beings and the cosmic-creational surroundings.” This statement articulates the fundamental experience of teología india. For Tomichá, the theology presented in Laudato Si' affirms this relationality and connectedness and opens new possibilities for transforming the colonial theology. Tomichá examines the possibility of developing a new Trinitarian theology of cosmic unity that is holistic, plural, and that is centered on life and on the earth, as well as the possibility of a plural church and ecclesiology. Decolonial turns are threatening to the ecclesial institutions and their clerical, patriarchal power structures. Pope Francis himself has reiterated this on several occasions.35 There is a potential theological and ecclesial decolonial turn underway, but what form will this turn take in the future is not evident yet. Time will tell.

34  Roberto Tomichá Charupá, “Towards a Church with an Amerindian Face: Some Premises and Urgent Challenges,” in Andraos, ed. The Church and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, 13–29. On the point of Indigenous contribution to the renewal of theology, see Eleazar López Hernández, “Experiencia Teologal Indígena: Aporte a la Humanidad y las Iglesias,” in Decoloniality and Justice, 65–72. 35  See Pope Francis’ letter to Cardinal Marc Ouellet, President of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, Vatican, March 19, 2016, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/ en/letters/2016/documents/papa-francesco_20160319_pont-comm-america-latina.html. See also the commentary article on this topic by the late Gregory Baum, “Pope Francis’s Polemic Against Clericalism,” The Ecumenist 53, no. 4 (Fall 2016): 6–9.

CHAPTER 8

Indigenous Decolonial Movements in Abya Yala, Aztlán, and Turtle Island: A Comparison Néstor Medina

My intention in this chapter is to briefly explore some of the implications of three reports from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the context of Canada and the Commission for Historical Clarification/ National Reconciliation Commission (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico/Comisión Nacional para la Reconciliación) (CEH/CNR) together with the Recovery of the Historical Memory Project (Projecto para el Recobro de la Memoria Histórica) (REMHI) in Guatemala. I do not intend to recount or rehearse what happened in the residential schools in Canada or replay the genocidal acts committed against the indigenous peoples of Guatemala. Instead and in response to the chapters of Enrique Dussel and Sylvia Marcos, I read these documents with a decolonial posture. I seek to dis-cover the confluence of historical-cultural factors and the colonizing ideological apparatus that culminated in the concrete construction of racialized sociocultural structures that left no room for the existence of the indigenous peoples, cultures, traditions, and religions in both countries. I also intend to highlight the meaning of these reports for the indigenous communities from which they emerged and how they N. Medina (*) Emmanuel College Centre for Religion in Its Context, Toronto, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2019 R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_8

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already embody what can be appropriately called decolonial epistemological impetuses. I argue that a decolonizing of theological discourse in the Americas must include revisiting the experiences of colonization and violence against the indigenous peoples, as well as the affirmation of the reclaiming of their own faith traditions as theoethical loci. I want to propose that although these two contexts of violence (Guatemala and Canada) are very different, they are interwoven as a result of the historical events that were inaugurated by the series of encounters that began with 1492,1 when Christopher Columbus stumbled on the continent we today call the Americas, but which was already known by names given to it by the natives peoples of the lands as Abya Yala, Aztlán, Turtle Island, or Weesakajack.2 Each context emerges out of different contingents of European colonialism (France, Britain, and Spain) and involves interaction with the indigenous peoples in ways which are markedly different from the other. Still, each instance is part of the complex that Enrique Dussel calls ego conquiro—which defined the imperialism and colonization experienced by indigenous peoples.3

Context of the Documents Both documents are marked by different historical trajectories. Yet when they are viewed from their unique context they reveal the multifactorial interweaving of racialized forces strategically designed to control and dis1  I use 1492 in order to resituate the focus of this conversation, insisting that it marks the effective erasure of the histories and the stories of the originary peoples of the region prior to the arrival of the Europeans. Moreover, while 1492 is an important date, I agree with Felipe Fernández Armesto that when viewed in light of multiple other events that took place in Europe the same year, it was not an extraordinary year. What was/is extraordinary was that the encounter between indigenous peoples and Europeans gave birth to an entire multifactorial ideology of European self-perceived superiority that shaped such encounters. See Felipe Fernández Armesto, 1492: The Year Our World Began (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2009). 2  Abya Yala is a term from the Kuna nation (they are located in the North region of Colombia and Southeast region of Panama) which means “land in full maturity” or “land of vital blood,” and which rejects ideas of the Americas as the “New World.” Aztlán is the Nahua word used to identify the ancestral land of the Aztec people. Aztecah is the Nahua word that means “people of Aztlán,” which refers to sections in the north of Mexico and the southwest of the United States of America. Turtle Island refers to the way the Ojibway and other First Nations of Canada speak about the creation of the world. There are also other names related to the origin of the world, for example Weesakajack, which emphasizes how today’s Anglo North American region came to be. 3  E. Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1995), 12. See also Chap. 2 in this volume.

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mantle the social, cultural, and epistemological structures of the ­indigenous peoples.4 The diverse attacks by the forces of colonization against indigenous forms of knowledge (los saberes de los pueblos) were intended to eradicate even the possibility that these communities could rebuild themselves. One could say that the context of Guatemala can be defined by armed violence on the part of the government, justified as a war against Communism, which was in great part financed and manipulated from outside by the United States  of America. But such a simplistic explanation does not allow us to see how this protracted civil war—which left more than 200,000 people dead of which 83% were of Mayan background—had a double character. On one hand, the war was the logical result of the colonization, civilization, and Christianization initiated by Spain around 1523 when Pedro de Alvarado arrived in the region. On the other hand, from the middle of the twentieth century-on, the war changed in character, serving instead neocolonial foreign economic interests that supported corrupt governments and dictatorships.5 Foreign economic interests continue to shape government’s policies even today. 4  In order to avoid any kind of essentialism, it is important to highlight the internal differences between Indigenous peoples. When speaking about Indigenous peoples I refer to the richly diverse mosaic of languages, traditions, cultures, genealogies, histories, mythologies, and forms of knowledge. It is important to also acknowledge that among some of these people there were internal disputes and strife, which often resulted in violent exchanges, even wars. For example, the formation of empires like the Nahua or the Inka are important referents which help avoid any type of romanticization of these diverse peoples. Moreover, consistent with the decolonial critique and what Anibal Quijano identifies as “coloniality of power,” I want to emphasize that Indigenous peoples in Guatemala and Canada are diverse, multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual. My use of terms like “Indigenous,” “originary peoples,” or “aboriginals” is not intended to homogenize these groups. I reject totalizing notions that lump these communities together and give the wrong impression that all of them are the same without noting their profound differences. See Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina,” in Pensar (en) los intersticios: Teoría y práctica de la crítica poscolonial, ed. Santiago Castro-Gómez, Oscar GuardiolaRivera, and Carmen Millán de Benavides (Santa Fe de Bogotá: CEJA: Instituto Pensar, 1999), 99–109. 5  Guatemala has a long history of corruption and militarization at the highest levels of government. At the beginning of the 1930s Guatemalans began to experience foreign influence and interventionism from the United States of America, specifically through the United Fruit Company, a corporation to which dictators like Jorge Ubico Castañeda (president from 1931 to 1944) granted enormous parcels of land. During the presidential tenure of Juan José Arévalo Bermejo (democratically elected in 1944), the office of human rights and labor reforms were set in place. His successor and friend, Jacobo Árbenz, started an agrarian reform that targeted the interests of the United Fruit Company and resulted in the military coup on

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Meanwhile, the Canadian history of residential schools was no less violent in its own way, in terms of the damages caused to indigenous people’s identities and the resulting experiences of trauma. Although the Canadian context was not marked by bellicose exchanges as was the case in Guatemala, the residential schools constituted the continuation of the original invasion, conquest, colonization, and Christianization that began with the arrival of the French via de St. Lawrence River (1534) and was continued with the subsequent arrival of the British when the lands were ceded according to the conditions stipulated in the Treaty of Paris (1763). This brief chapter does not allow us to interrogate the cultural, political, ideological apparatus that fed the creation of the residential schools, but suffice it to say that they left as a toll more than 6000 dead children, and thousands others who were abused sexually, physically, emotionally, and culturally in the context of the schools. These schools functioned as effective racialized centers of evangelization and Christianization.6 It is worth noting that government forces in Guatemala used the eradication of “Communism” or “guerrilla groups” as the excuse behind which to hide and justify their assault against the indigenous peoples. As one ex-­soldier stated, “[the army] wanted to get rid of all the men and the boys to eliminate the possibility of the guerrillas.”7 The soldiers and patrols June 27, 1954, organized by the State Department of the United States of America and financed by the United Fruit Company, who accused him of being Communist. These series of events were followed by a long list of military juntas and dictatorships that benefitted the economic interests of United States-based and -owned corporations and multinationals (e.g., the Murphy Pacific Corporation of California). These developments and tensions contributed to the emergence of armed resistance movements, which culminated in the formation of the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP) (Guerrilla Army of the poor), with the purpose of protecting the interests of farmers and Indigenous peoples, and to protest against military dictatorships. The armed conflict increased and became a civil war which lasted 36 years (1960–1996). 6  While they were in operation, about 150,000 native children were placed in residential schools of which up to 6000 died because of abuse—children were handcuffed, beaten, locked in cellars and other makeshift jails or displayed in stocks—poor sanitation, or lack of proper medical attention in the case of contagious or deadly diseases. Residential schools were centers of child labor undertaken to subsidize the ongoing operation of the schools. See The Survivors Speak: A Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Canada: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015), vi–viii, http://www.trc. ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Findings/Survivors_Speak_2015_05_30_web_o. pdf (accessed June 14, 2016). 7  (Case 1944, Quiché). Guatemala, Never Again, trans. Gretta Tovar Siebentritt, Recovery of the Historical Memory Project, The Official Report of the Human Rights Office and Archdiocese of Guatemala (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1999), 31.

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“frequently spoke about killing children as a way to eliminate the possibilities for communities to rebuild themselves, and as one way to avoid that the victims obtain justice.”8 Meanwhile, residential schools in Canada took place within the understanding of the responsibility of the British Crown toward the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. It received concrete expression in the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857. The responsibility was later transferred to the then emerging country of Canada through the British North America Act (BNAA) of 1867, and two years later was reiterated in the proclamation of the Gradual Enfranchisement Act in 1869.9 In other words, in Guatemala the atrocities against the indigenous peoples took place surreptitiously as part of a culture of illegality and impunity. By way of contrast, in Canada, the schools were articulated as expressions of the “care” of the new nation for the natives, while at the same time imposing on them the “rule of law” with the intention of converting them into “productive citizens.” In both Guatemala and Canada, children were targeted as a primary locus for change, whether by killing them or civilizing them. As the Department of Indian Affairs in Canada stated it: The census shows that the Indians are not decreasing in numbers. They are here to stay and the question naturally arises, what are we to do with them? And what obligations devolve upon the Government in regard to providing means for their advancement and civilization? Are they always to remain a charge on the country, or shall we, by educating the rising generation, endeavor to make them self-supporting and fitted for the duties and privileges of civilized life? The Department, recognizing the responsibility in regard to the future welfare of its Indian wards, has established and is now providing for and carrying on three classes of Indian schools.10

Or as we encounter it in the official report of the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada: Let us have Christianity and civilization to leaven the mass of heathenism and paganism among the Indian tribes; let us have a wise and paternal  Guatemala, Never Again, 31.  Years later, the British North America Act and the Gradual Enfranchisement Act were consolidated with the proclamation of the Indian Act (1876). 10  “Memorandum,” Department of Indian Affairs, Ottawa, July 1897, page 14 (RG 10, Volume 6039, file 160–1, part 1). 8 9

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­ overnment faithfully carrying out the provisions of our treaties, and doing g its utmost to help and elevate the Indian population, who have been cast upon our care, and we will have peace, progress, and concord among them in the northwest; and instead of the Indian melting away, as one of them in older Canada, tersely puts it, “as snow before the sun,” we will see our Indian population, loyal subjects of the Crown happy, prosperous and self-­ sustaining, and Canada will be enabled to feel, that in a truly patriotic spirit, our country has done its duty by the red men of the northwest, and thereby to herself. So may it be.”11

Internalized Negative Effects These sophisticated forms of violence had enormous effects, though the kind of violence and its impact were different in each context. In the Guatemalan case, the culture of violence had genocide as the goal, the eradication of the indigenous peoples. The measures taken by the government to ensure the displacement of the Mayan peoples from the region effectively led to the militarization and terrorization of social life. By murdering and terrorizing people, the government kept them out of the way and created the opportunities for the exploitation of the mineral resources of the region through projects like “La Franja Transvesal del Norte”— which coincidentally corresponded with the zone where the armed conflict was most severe—created during the presidency of Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García (1974–1978). The following president, Fernando Romeo Lucas García (1978–1982), inaugurated an aggressive literacy campaign of Castilianization (Castellanización) to “help” the indigenous to learn to read and write Spanish.12 These military, economic, and cultural incursions, especially the uneven armed conflict between the heavily 11  “Indian and Eskimo Residential Schools,” Popular Information Series No. 12, Missionary Society of England in Canada (September 1939): 2, 4. 12  Lucas García was the director of the Franja Transversal del Norte project during the presidency of Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García (1974–1978). The project was designed for the systematic extraction and exploitation of minerals in the regions with the greatest concentration of the indigenous population. Without consideration of this history of systematic discrimination and exploitation, Amy Sherman wrote that the Indigenous peoples and the poor sectors of Guatemala are responsible for their own impoverishment. She claims that their poverty is the result of the “culture of poverty” which they reproduce and which impedes them from “advancing” and “contributing” to the development of the country. See Amy L. Sherman, The Soul of Development: Biblical Christianity and Economic Transformation in Guatemala (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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armed government and indigenous peoples resulted in the disarticulation of the indigenous cultures, destroyed their traditions, customs, and social structures, and caused great damage to the connection the people have with the earth. In addition to leaving more than 200,000 dead, it left thousands of others with deep psychological problems and trauma.13 The violence continues: two days after the official report of the Commission was published under the title Guatemala: Nunca Más, (1998) (Guatemala, Never Again!), the director of the Commission, Bishop of Quiché Juan José Girardi, was murdered.14 Corruption continues and the indigenous peoples continue to struggle to get different levels of government to fulfill the stipulations of the peace accord of 1996 and the conditions put in place by the National Reconciliation Commission. In the context of Canada, the purpose of the residential schools was more of a culturecide and ethnocide. The government of Canada, through church-run residential schools, sought to extirpate the indigenous from the “human being,” which had the detrimental effect of paralyzing the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit. Education and evangelization became the  Ver Guatemala Nunca Más; La Memoria del Silencio, y Testigos del Tiempo.  Guatemala Never Again! was produced by the Human Rights Office of the Guatemalan Archbishopric (ODHAG) and the Commission for the Recovery of the Historical Memory Project (REMHI). The government forces, the police, and the army did everything possible to impede the naming and punishing of the perpetrators of Girardi’s assassination by the laws of the country. In 1999 the official report of the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) was published with the title: La Memoria del Silencio (The Memory of Silence). After 36  years, the Guatemalan armed conflict ended in 1996 when the government signed a peace accord (the Oslo Accords) with the insurgent group, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG). Part of the accords directed the United Nations to organize a Commission of Historical Clarification (CEH). It began working in July 1997, funded by a number of countries, including the United States of America. In February 1999, it released its report, “Guatemala: Memory of Silence,” which stated that a governmental policy of genocide was carried out against the Mayan Indians. The CEH concluded the army committed genocide against four specific groups: the Ixil Mayas; the Q’anjob’al and Chuj Mayas; the K’iche’ Mayas of Joyabaj, Zacualpa and Chiché; and the Achi Mayas. In November 1998, three former members of a “civil patrol” were convicted in the first case arising from the genocide. In September 2009, the courts sentenced Military Commissioner Felipe Cusanero to 150 years in prison for the crime of enforced disappearance of six members of the Choatulum indigenous community. In June 2011, General Héctor Mario López Fuentes was caught and charged with genocide and crimes against humanity. In August 2011, four soldiers were sentenced to 30 years for each murder plus 30 years for crimes against humanity, totaling 6060 years each for the massacre in a village of Dos Erres in Guatemala’s northern Petén region. See https://www.hmh.org/la_Genocide_ Guatemala.shtml (accessed June 15, 2016). 13 14

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mechanisms for cultural and identity displacement and reconfiguration, severing the connections the children had with their customs, traditions, forms of knowledge, and the historical imaginary of the communities to which they belonged.15 The residential schools system also accomplished the disarticulation of the children’s social and relational structures16 and broke their relations with the land. The trauma they experienced robbed them of their ability to live and to be able to reinsert themselves in their communities. In the words of Richard Kaiyogan, who attended the Coppermine tent hostel: But over the years, if you talk in your own language you get strapped, and later on, I had to learn the hard way by myself, I think over the years I earned that, we earn it, take this education. One time I got strapped and I didn’t want to get strapped anymore so I said to myself, I said, “What am I here for?” You know, education, I guess. Anyway, my culture is going to be—my language will be lost in the way. Okay, why not think like a white man? Talk like a white man? Eat like a white man, that’s what, so I don’t have to get strapped anymore. You know, I followed their own rules.17

The Role of the Religious One of the greatest negative impacts was the disconnection of the people with the land and its relation to their cosmogony. The presidency/dictatorship of Efraín Rios Montt (1982–1983) and his policy of scorching the earth was especially noteworthy because it constituted an assault to the very identity of the people. Their traditions were interrupted and the people were prevented from carrying out important rites and religious 15  Thaddee Andre, who attended the Sept-Îles, Québec, school in the 1950s recalled how as a student he wanted “to resemble the white man, then in the meantime, they are trying by all means to strip you of who you are as an Innu. When you are young, you are not aware of what you are losing as a human being” (The Survivors Speak, 56). 16  Albert Southland, the Rector of the Gordon Reserve School in Saskatchewan in 1957 believed that the goal of residential schooling was to “change the philosophy of the Indian child. In other words since they must work and live with ‘whites’ then they must begin to think as ‘whites.’” Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Canada: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015), 6, http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Findings/Exec_Summary_2015_05_31_web_o.pdf (accessed June 14, 2016). 17  The Survivors Speak, 51.

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t­raditions; they were not able to deal with the dead in their ways, their relation to the land including with the spirits of their ancestors was interrupted, and their cosmogony as children of corn, children of the land was imperiled. In all of these aspects the indigenous peoples’ cultures and traditions were disarticulated as a result of their displacement.18 We cannot ignore the profound process of Christian “re-­evangelization” that Guatemala has been undergoing since the 1970s, as the monopoly Catholicism had over the religious landscape has been dismantled and the population has increasingly converted to Evangelicalism/Pentecostalism. During the period which coincided with the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) and the Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM) (1968) in Medellin, Colombia, in the highlands of Guatemala, sectors of the Catholic church ceased to be in cahoots with the oligarchies of Guatemala. Many Catholic priests shifted their political commitment and adopted a posture of accompaniment in support of indigenous people and farmers. During the time of greatest repression many people, including the indigenous, turned to the Evangelicals and Pentecostals as a “safe” alternative to escape the government’s repression targeting revolutionary Catholics.19 Among the Evangelicals, in some instances the repression was interpreted as part of divine providence to “reclaim” Guatemala for Christ.20 One effect of the evangelization was the adoption of an Eurocentric experience of faith brought by foreign Western European and Anglo North American missionaries, which promoted the abandonment 18  For a discussion on Indigenous spiritualities, see Chap. 4 by Sylvia Marcos in this collection. 19  The official reports from the Commissions in Guatemala speak about the role of the evangelical sectors in the country. According to those documents, Evangelicals tend to neutralize/depoliticize the indigenous communities by redefining spirituality (and I would add morality) as an internal/private personal aspect. The internalization of spirituality has the effect of de-emphasizing the nature of the repression and discouraging any type of involvement to change their situation. See Guatemala, Never Again, 22. 20  Key here is the government of Efrain Rios Montt from El Verbo Evangelical Mission, who during his one year as president used the expansion of the gospel as an excuse to counter the advance of Communism in the country. See Néstor Medina, “The New Jerusalem Versus Social Responsibility: The Challenges of Pentecostalism in Guatemala,” in Perspectives in Pentecostal Eschatologies, ed. Peter Althouse and Robby Waddell (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publishers, 2010), 315–39; Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efrain Rios Montt 1982–1983, Religion and Global Politics (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011); Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Living in the New Jerusalem: Protestantism in Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).

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of cultural and autochthonous musical instruments and demonized ancestral spiritualities and the cosmovision of the people. In Canada, the direct complicity of the Christian-religious structures with the forces of oppression against the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit is more explicit but not less complicated. There is no doubt that notions of civilization and ethnoracialization were interwoven with a Eurocentric version of Christianity. Moreover, self-perceived ideas of the “superior” humanity of the European were presented as the goal and objective of the residential schools and of the education indigenous children received. Such Eurocentric civilizational, moralizing, and pedagogical framing did not allow administrators, instructors, priests, and ministers involved to see the humanity of the indigenous peoples. It acted as a blinder which impeded Euro-Canadians from recognizing indigenous cultural and epistemological wealth. They instead demonized indigenous forms of knowledge and spiritualities.

The Decolonizing Impetuses I do not want to undermine the negative effects of these experiences of violent trauma, which contributed to processes of deep self-hatred and which were initiated by a series of European conquests and invasions of the Americas.21 I affirm Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, who notes that conquest and trauma contributed to an internal colonization.22 Nevertheless, the characterization of the indigenous peoples of Abya Yala, Aztlán, Weesekajack, or Turtle Island as victims does not help us to appreciate the outcome of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Commission for Historical Clarification as two versions of concrete resistance and resilience. In the remainder of this brief chapter, I want to propose that the achievements of each of these commissions are concrete expressions of an 21  A good example here is Garcilaso de la Vega. See Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Diario del Inca Garcilaso (1562–1616), ed. Francisco Carrillo Espejo (Lima, Perú: Editorial Horizonte, 1996). Another more recent example is the field work of Marta Elena Casaús Arzú, who found in her numerous interviews among the Guatemalan elite many who by any account should be considered mestizas/os (i.e., with Indigenous and European ancestry) but rejected their Indigenous ancestral connections and self-identified as white. See Marta Elena Casaús Arzú, Guatemala: Linaje y Racismo (Costa Rica: Editorial FLACSO, 1992). 22  Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Chhixinakax utxiwa. Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores,” in Modernidad y Pensamiento Descolonizador, ed. Mario Yupi (Bolivia, La Paz: U-PIEB/IFEA, 2006), 3–16.

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incarnated decolonial impetus from the indigenous peoples of these two contexts. Memory: Refusal to Be Forgotten While the “First World” makes all kinds of efforts to claim innocence, freely and unilaterally choosing what to remember or not to remember from the pages of history,23 these Commissions incarnate a historical and historiographical reorientation. They establish the memory of the indigenous communities in their incredible diversity as the main historiographical axis. The official reports from these Commissions interrogate notions of history as written only from the vantage point of the victorious. Instead, in those documents we find the excluded voices that complement and correct the already existing annals of history. In other words, the present historical record does not make sense without a re-tracing of the historical moments that the dominant version does not include. The memory and the testimony of the indigenous peoples operate as counter-narratives that reconstruct the history of these peoples and of these countries out of the historical debris of their collective memories. Stated differently, neither the history of Guatemala nor the history of Canada can be conceived in a sanitized way. These documents help us see the ways in which the tentacles of coloniality (European, Anglo North American, and internally) impact the very social tapestry of these communities. The Commissions aid us to have a better understanding of historical processes; we learn that history takes place in the borders of power negotiations, between violence, oppression, repression, resistance, and self-determination. The fragmented memory and the testimony of indigenous peoples, their experiences as victims, and the memory of those who died in the process become the essential ingredients that leave open/unfinished the very act of making of history, historiography, and, for the purposes of this chapter, doing theology and ethics. They demonstrate that historical events are irreducible to the written registry; what happened is always far more than what we manage to record.

23  R Radhakrishnan, “Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity,” Callaloo 16, no. 4 (Autumn 1993): 750.

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Other Forms of Knowing/Otros Saberes Decolonial thinking understands the posture of strategic and intentional search for alternatives to the European-Eurocentric intellectual frames as “epistemic disobedience.” The intention, decolonial thinkers argue, is to de-link from modern rationality because it is a constitutive part of the projects of colonization. By the same token, colonization and its residual impetus of coloniality are incomprehensible without modernity as their intellectual organizational frame and with reason/instrumental reason as their premise.24 This strategic de-linking from modern rationality results in the celebration of “other” forms of knowledge and knowing as legitimate, with their own epistemic and intellectual genealogy as counterpoints to modernity/coloniality.25 These other knowledges offer us alternatives of how to interpret the Western European and Anglo North Atlantic intellectual edifice, including theology and ethics, and particularly its complicity with colonization. We are talking about a decentralizing or, better yet, provincializing of modern rationality as one form of constructing knowledge among others. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Commission for the Recovery of the Historical Memory constitute a de-linking from the modern project. They embody the reclaiming/restoring of the forms of knowledge of the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit in Canada and the indigenous Mayas in Guatemala, respectively. There are signs of hope! Guatemala has officially adopted a policy of intercultural bilingual education. It is compulsory now for all children to receive instruction in one of the Mayan languages, generally Quiché or Kaqchickel. In addition, Guatemala now has several indigenous ­universities

24  Walter Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience and the De-colonial Option: A Manifesto” (2007), Waltermignolo.com/txt/Epistemic_Disobedience_and_the_Decolonial_Option_a_ Manifesto.doc (accessed August 5, 2011). This de-linking with modern rationality is one of the ways in which decolonial thinkers differentiate postcolonial thinking from decolonial discourses. The former operates within the spheres of modern rationality drawing from Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, while the latter insists on the need to draw from their own wells of knowledge, as an alternative to Western European Anglo North Atlantic intellectual tradition. 25  Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience and the De-colonial Option,” 5.

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(University Maya Popol Wuj26; University Ixil,27 and University Maya Kaqchickel)28 with the goal of revitalizing, preserving, and expanding the languages, cultures, and knowledges of the Mayan peoples, and of restoring their relationship with the earth. In Canadian universities, there are departments and programs of indigenous studies, and now, in the Universities of Lakeland and Winnipeg, it is required for all students to take a course on indigenous studies. In the Parliament of Canada, the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit are spoken of as founding nations of the country. Moreover, the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, offered an official apology to the indigenous peoples on behalf of the government of Canada (2008) for the government’s part in the attempts at destroying the indigenous communities, their traditions, cultures, and forms of knowledge. The religious groups and denominations involved in the residential schools preceded the government with their own apologies.29 Without romanticizing the various official apologies to the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit in Canada, and without overestimating the symbolic character of the changes that have taken place in favor of the indigenous peoples in Guatemala, in the last couple of decades, it is crucial to 26  Known as “Mayab Nibatijob” in the Quiché language, the university was presented officially on September 10, 2004 by the Mayan National Council of Education (CNEM). It is directed and administered by Indigenous faculty. Although still using certain Western parameters in terms of division of fields and disciplines such as agronomy, education, astronomy, architecture, the arts, and community development, the curriculum also includes subjects such as Mayan medicine, law, and mathematics. One fascinating piece of information is that the faculty of these latter subjects are elders who know the Indigenous cultures and traditions, but who do not necessarily possess institutional academic degrees in order to teach their subjects. Led by a council of elders, the university seeks to highlight, preserve, and expand the millenarian Mayan culture. See “Guatemala: Universidad Indígena para preservar la cultura Maya.” Terribelere December 21, 2004, http://www.terrelibere.org/490-guatemalauniversidad-indgena-para-preservar-cultura-maya/ (accessed June 30, 2017). 27  The University Ixil is not recognized by the Guatemalan Ministry of Education, but it is recognized and endorsed by the University Martin Luther King in Nicaragua. The university began its activities in 2011. 28  The University Maya Kaqchickel started in the town of Santo Domingo Xenacoj in the Department of San Pedro Sacatepéquez. It has branches in the municipalities of ChiXotSan Juan Comalapa, B’oko’-Chimaltenango, and Xena Koj-Santo Domingo Xenacoj, Department of Sacatepéquez. See http://universidadmayakaqchikel.weebly.com/ uploads/4/2/7/2/42729367/umayakaqchikel-briefinformativo.pdf (accessed June 30, 2017). 29  One of the first apologies offered to the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples was by the United Church of Canada in 1986.

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point out that those changes in both countries have not been granted voluntarily. They have been slow historic gains resulting from the constant struggle for survival indigenous peoples have confronted as the chapters by Sylvia Marcos and Luis Rivera Pagán illustrate. These achievements are the fruit of their refusal to forget. On Reconciliation As the summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada states, reconciliation is not a task for the aboriginal groups. Reconciliation, they say, is about “establishing and maintaining a mutually respectful relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in this country.”30 The report continues by stating: “In order for that to happen, there has to be awareness of the past, acknowledgement of the harm that has been inflicted, atonement for the causes, and action to change behaviour.”31 In very particular ways, the documents from both Commissions re-­ affirm the need to increase the participation of indigenous peoples as historical subjects in the processes of constructing societies with greater justice and peace. They demonstrate that it is not a matter of “forgiving and forgetting,”32 or, as the Commission in Canada pointed out, it is not about “closing a sad chapter of Canada’s past” “but about opening new healing pathways of reconciliation that are forged in truth and justice.”33 The reports provide us with a broad version of reconciliation that includes the memory of the past and the reclamation of the free self-determination  Honouring the Truth, 6.  Honouring the Truth, 6. The Commission report adds:

30 31

A just reconciliation requires more than simply talking about the need to heal the deep wounds of history. Words of apology alone are insufficient; concrete actions on both symbolic and material fronts are required. Reparations for historical injustices must include not only apology, financial redress, legal reform, and policy change, but also the rewriting of national history and public commemoration. (Ibid., 263). As one of the witnesses in the Commission in Guatemala said: “I do not want revenge, because otherwise there is no end to the violence … what I ask is their repentance.” (Guatemala, Never Again, 25). 32  In the words of one of the witnesses to the Commission for the Recovery of the Historical Memory: “Some say that we have to put it behind you - I can’t” (Case 9014, Massacre Quiché). Guatemala, Never Again, 17. 33  Honouring the Truth, 12.

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of indigenous peoples as condition for the construction of the future. The fundamental demand in the reports rests on the creation of an imaginary where the creation of a space for the coexistence of the many multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multilingual nations is possible. I propose that the search for reconciliation expressed in these official reports is based on a recovery of the memory of the past and the dignity of the peoples. The reports also offer glimpses of two way-of-life proposals diametrically opposite to the present rapacious neoliberal capitalist imaginary in which life itself is commodified, and the rich diversity of peoples and their cultures and knowledges are seen as new products for consumption and profit-making. These documents show how indigenous communities seek to recover their relation with the earth based on the material, spiritual, and communal interweaving of life on earth. Moreover, documents like the Popol Vuh,34 Chilam Balam, and El Memorial de Sololá,35 among others,36 constitute a different epistemological canon that does not have as a goal to compete with or to directly counter modern rationality or coloniality. Rather, they seek to respond to the challenges and concerns of their own reality and contexts from their own epistemological horizons.

Implications for the Theoethical Task As I have shown, there is much that can be gleaned from engaging decolonial thinking to help us appreciate how each of the Commissions in Guatemala and Canada and their official reports embodies decolonial impetuses. When adapted to theoethics, it becomes clear that thinking theologically and ethically in a decolonial key forces us to take seriously the underside of modernity, the peoples, communities, traditions, cultures, forms of knowledge, and religious traditions of the indigenous peoples, who were the first casualties of the original encounters between Europe and the “Americas” post 1492. Here Enrique Dussel’s chapter helps us retrace some 34  Popol Vuh: las historias del Quiché, trans. Adrián Recinos (Guatemala: Piedra Santa, 1990). 35  Memorial de Sololá, Anales de los Kaqchikeles: Título de los señores de Totonicapán, trans. Adrián Recinos (Guatemala: Piedra Santa, 2003). 36  Abya Yala, Una visión indígena, prologue by Evo Morales (La Habana, Cuba: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales y Letras Urgentes, 2011); Emilie Smith-Ayala, The Granddaughters of Ixmucané: Guatemalan Women Speak, trans. Emilie Smith-Ayala (Toronto, ON: Women’s press, n.d.).

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of the intellectual connections we ought to make as we consider the theoethical import of decolonial concerns. As we begin to think about decolonizing ethics,  theologies, and the theological task, we are compelled to interrogate the ways in which inherited mainstream disallow the theological knowledges and moralities of the peoples of the Global South. For Latinas/ os, engaging theoethics in a decolonial key will entail reclaiming our interconnection with the experience of racism and discrimination that indigenous communities in the Americas have experienced for the last 500 years and our own experiences of social, political, and cultural marginalization and discrimination in our own social context of the United States of America and Canada. Both experiences of racism and discrimination are part of the larger 500-year history of colonization and violence. Thinking theoethics in a decolonial key will require, however, a deeper self-critical stance enquiring about the ways in which our theologies and ethics exclude indigenous (and Afrodescendant) forms of knowledge and experiences of faith from our theological and ethical reflections. It will also mean uncovering the ways in which our own Latina/o communities reproduce inherited colonizing attitudes and the present neoliberal capitalist ethos. And it will involve highlighting the ways in which Latina/o theoethics have lost their connections with the earth and failed to address environmental concerns. There are some important points to celebrate. The Mayan communities in Guatemala and the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit in Canada illustrate for us that different communities are arriving to “decolonizing” insights without resorting to or adopting “decolonial theoretical frames.” I propose that, in many ways, Latinas/os theologies already embody “decolonizing” impetuses: in the ways they reclaim their collective memory; in their intercultural (en conjunto) ways of constructing knowledge; in their challenges to the dominant historiographical record to include the violence of the conquest and colonization; and in their daring claim to make the people a locus enunciationis (the place from which we speak) and locus theologicus (the place where we do theology). Latina/o theologies represent a “decolonizing” force without the strictures of “Latin American and Latina/o decolonial frames.” As Latina/o theologians we need to be cognizant that by placing our communities at the center of the theological task, we relativize the Western European and Anglo North Atlantic sources of theology, and resituate our (including indigenous and African) sources of knowledge outside the scope of the Western European intellectual tradition. In other words, Latina/o theology already contains many elements of a decolonizing theological approach on its own merit. For Latina/o

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theologians, the goal has not been the creation of a grand theoretical frame, but the careful articulation of the particular ways in which our communities live their faith in God. Such a methodological move is itself decolonizing. Thus, the fundamental challenge facing Latina/o theology is how to enhance and develop those “decolonizing” aspects drinking from the intellectual wells of our peoples, histories, and experiences.

PART III

Decolonial Politics and Theological Possibilities

CHAPTER 9

Decolonizing the Cosmo-Polis: Cosmopolitanism as a Rehumanizing Project An Yountae

Rooted in the Greek term kosmopolitês, the notion of cosmopolitanism offers a theoretical framework for advancing universal ideals of egalitarianism and freedom in the age of multicultural globalism. Under the banner “citizen of the world,” cosmopolitan discourse presents, according to the German social scientist Ulrich Beck, the question of “how solidarity with strangers, among non-equals can be made possible.”1 The different meanings associated with the vast spectrum of contemporary cosmopolitan discourse aside, for many, it offers a new transnational framework for negotiating burning issues in the global world shaped by cultural encounters and globalization such as world citizenship, social movements, global democracy, and post-identity politics.2 1  Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitical Perspective: Sociology of the Second Age Modernity,” British Journal of Sociology 1, no 1 (January 2000): 92. 2  See, Jurgen Habersmas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001); David Held, Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Reality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Seyla Benhabib, The Right of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

An Yountae (*) California State University, Northridge, Northridge, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_9

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Cosmopolitanism attempts to reconfigure traditional notions of identity, belonging, and citizenship conceived by the hegemonic epistemological framework of the West.3 Thus, it is not strange that cosmopolitanism is often in dialogue—and in some cases it converges—with postcolonial theory. However, cosmopolitanism’s collusion with both the imperialist history of the West and the neocolonial manifestation of capitalist globalization is not sufficiently examined. Despite numerous historical studies that have demonstrated cosmopolitanism’s close tie to imperialism, contemporary critical studies of globalization and colonialism have either adopted it rather uncritically or rejected it completely.4 On a practical level, the problem with cosmopolitanism lies in the popular and rather superficial conception of “the cosmopolitan citizen” as a consumption-driven experience with access to diverse cultural artifacts and geographic locations (global tourism). The emphasis on freedom of movement without a proper analysis of power has provoked a wide range of criticisms. For critics, such form of cosmopolitan identity is elitist in essence: privileged bourgeoisie subject without political commitments.5 On a more theoretical level, its celebration of movement, exchange, and multiculturalism can easily conflate with the imperialist ethos of borderless universalism (or expansionism) driving globalization. Cosmopolitanism hides its deep root in Western liberal notion of freedom.6 This chapter takes a critical approach to cosmopolitanism by examining the formative historical moments of Western cosmopolitanism. As both Enrique Dussel and Luis N. Rivera-Pagán contest in the initial chapters of 3  Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, “Introduction: Conceiving Cosmopolitanism,” Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, Steven Vertrovec and Robin Cohen, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1. 4  See, Walter Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture, Vol 12, No 3. Fall, 2000:721–748; Craig Calhoun, Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (New York: Routledge, 2007); David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Catherine Lu, “The One and Many Faces of Cosmopolitanism,” The Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol 8, No 2, 2000:244–267; Eduardo Mendieta, Ethics and Global Politics, Vol 2, Issue 3, 2009:241–158; Pheng Cheah, “Cosmopolitanism,” Theory, Culture, and Society, Vol 23, Issue 2–3, 2006:486–496. 5  Ibid., 5–6. 6  To be clear, cosmopolitanism is not an exclusively Western notion. However, its contemporary use in Western academia presupposes cosmopolitanism as a Western invention. It is not my intention to map out the global genealogy of cosmopolitanism. Rather, I attempt to rethink the possible intersections between cosmopolitanism and colonialism.

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this book, the colonial encounter of the 1492 was a decisive historical event that shaped Christianity and the self-identity of both the Americas and Europe. Christian Europe reinvents its self-identity at the juncture in which colonial encounter gives birth to Europe’s modernity. Crucial to this process of recreating Europe’s self-identity was the sixteenth-century Valladolid debate, the juridico-theological debate on the nature of Indians. I follow both Fernando Segovia’s and Luis N. Rivera-Pagán’s arguments for the need to examine the critical role of religion in the formation of colonial ideology in the sixteenth-century Iberian peninsula.7 In this chapter, I examine the Valladolid debate with the end of uncovering the colonial-imperial root of modern cosmopolitanism. This will let us reflect on the troubling juridico-theological notions of property and freedom informing liberal humanism, with which cosmopolitanism is deeply entangled.8 I seek to rethink cosmopolitanism by unveiling the connection between Imperial Christianity and neocolonialism hiding beneath its universal notion of the human. But instead of dismissing cosmopolitanism altogether, I seek to reconsider it in light of the lost tradition of negative cosmopolitanism, which can be found at the very inception of kosmopolitês. In order to counter the problematic notion of the human that gave rise to the dominant liberal brand of cosmopolitanism, I turn to Martinican philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon. Fanon saw his cosmopolitan politics as a rehumanizing project against the European ideal of universal humanity, which is sustained only at the expense of dehumanization of others. Fanon allows us to reconceive cosmopolitanism as a movement of negation, a negative cosmopolitanism that resists the dehumanizing neocolonial theology of globalization. With Fanon, the human becomes a synonym for constant action and struggle against the calcifying forces of dehumanization. 7  Fernando Segovia, “Mapping the Postcolonial Optic in Biblical Criticism: Meaning and Scope,” Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections, Stephen D. Moore and Fernando Segovia, eds. (London: T & T Clark, 2005).  Luis N.  Rivera-Pagan, Towards a Decolonial Theology: Perspectives from the Caribbean, 57. 8  Some of the important recent works that explore the connection between the notion of property and liberal subjectivity include Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Paula Chakravarty and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—An Introduction,” American Quarterly, Vol 63, Number 3, 2012:361–385.

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Cosmopolitanism: Its Mixed Trajectory The Western root of cosmopolitanism can be traced back to its Greek origin. The term cosmopolitan derives from kosmopolites, a combination of kosmos (κόσμος) and polites (πολίτης): citizen of the world. Contemporary cosmopolitan discourse has inherited the Stoic-Kantian emphasis on reason as well as the Kantian cosmopolitan idea of hospitality as the philosophical platform for its universal vision of conviviality with its base in transnational egalitarianism and solidarity. Acknowledging the danger lurking in its universalism, contemporary cosmopolitanism seeks a contextualized universalism by establishing specific universal norms that transcend national and cultural boundaries. For instance, Anthony Kwame Appiah points at the tension between universalism and particularism as the fundamental principle of cosmopolitanism: the moral idea of obligation to other beings and the concern for difference that is particularity of each individual being.9 Nevertheless, there is a certain normative ideal of universal basic rights that commonly frames the works of leading voices of cosmopolitan discourse such as Seyla Benhabib, Jurgen Habermas, and Ulrich Beck.10 Critics of cosmopolitanism find a strange resonance between cosmopolitan discourse and the imperialist ethos undergirding capitalist globalization. Many question the assumption that cosmopolitanism is inherently critical of the imperialist expansion of Western capital. They question whether cosmopolitanism is a mere description (and even a collaborator) or a counter-movement.11 It is perhaps not difficult to find a seamless continuity between the Kantian cosmopolitanism and the ancient Christian worldview of Orbis Christianus (The Christian Cosmos).12 It would be therefore wrong to assume that cosmopolitanism in itself speaks to sys-

9  Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Ethics in a World of Strangers: W.E.B. Bu Bois and the Spirit of Cosmopolitanism,” Justice, Governance, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Difference: Reconfigurations in a Transnational World, 31. 10  See, Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 84–104; Seyla Benhabib, The Right of Others (particularly, Introduction); Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization? (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 83–86. 11  David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 81. 12  Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000) 271.

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temic social inequalities.13 One can attribute the atrocious events of human history done under universal ideas to cosmopolitanism. As James Ingram writes, “cosmopolitanism has been intimately tied to world-spinning empires and proselytizing religions … it has inspired and justified many of history’s most devastating projects, from holy war to colonialism and communism to capitalist globalization.”14 It is perhaps not a coincidence that cosmopolitanism often reflects the privileged status of global elites, “the class consciousness of frequent travelers.”15 Equally problematic is the liberal spirit driving contemporary cosmopolitanism, which resembles the rhetoric of secular modernity. A critical quality of the cosmopolitan is the ability to transcend local culture and religious tradition. To become a cosmopolitan, one needs to submit to a modern-secular framework in which religion is subsumed under the private sphere. While the local is associated with culture, the cosmopolitan signals “an escape from it.”16 Religious identity is compatible with cosmopolitan subjectivity only insofar as they, the religious people, “become modern Christians, modern Hindus, or modern Muslims, that is to say progressive liberals with private, religious world-views.”17 Cosmopolitanism has also been instrumental for inspiring numerous projects of resistance and emancipation movements throughout history. Karl Marx’s vision of proletarian revolution was a project of cosmopolitan solidarity and utopia; the anti-racist and anti-colonial works of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon are profoundly shaped by cosmopolitan worldviews which gave birth to their pan-African vision of identity and solidarity. In Black Cosmopolitanism, Ifeoma Nwankwo examines how emancipatory movements in the Afro-Caribbean contexts took a cosmopolitan character. In this sense, Nwankwo writes, “the White fear that arose in the wake of Haitian revolution was not only a fear of violence but 13  Craig Calhoun, “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers,” South Atlantic Quarterly, Fall 2002, 101(4):890. 14  James Ingram, Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) 7. 15  Craig Calhoun, “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers,” South Atlantic Quarterly, Fall 2002, 101(4):869–897. 16  Craig Calhoun, “Secularism, Citizenship, and the Public Sphere,” Rethinking Secularism, Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 77. 17   Peter Van der Veer, “Colonial Cosmopolitanism,” Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, 171–172.

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also a fear of people of African descent’s embrace of cosmopolitanisms—of their defining themselves through a Black world that included Haitians.18 Cosmopolitanism, I contend, is indispensable for both calibrating the scope and role of colonial-imperialist Christianity and for envisioning a Christianity capable of inspiring decolonial imaginations. The ambiguity regarding the use and meaning of cosmopolitanism can be traced back to its inception and early usages. One of the earliest appearances of the term cosmopolitan takes place through Diogenes the Cynic. A satiric play by Lucian features Diogenes who is being sold at a slave market where gods are selling philosophers as slaves. When asked by the buyer where he is from, Diogenes replies, “from everywhere.” When the puzzled buyer asks for clarification, Diogenes answers: “you are looking at a citizen of the world.” This means, in one of its earliest appearances in Western tradition, cosmopolitanism was a negative notion. It was a negation of both his affiliation to a place and his status as a slave against the imperialist politics of Greek cosmopolitanism.19 Such politics of refusal and negation is lost in the evolution of modern cosmopolitan discourse. Modern and contemporary discourses of cosmopolitanism are grounded not in the Diogenic tradition but in the Stoics’. The Stoic notion of cosmopolitanism is anchored in the work of Cicero and Epictetus, both of whom rely on Socrates’s term kosmios (Universian: man of the universe), a term that begs difference from “citizen of the world” (polites tou kosmos).20 The early formulation of Epictetus’s Universian rejects a direct affiliation with empire. Epictetus places kinship with god above everything else (emperor), yet he leaves the door open for the emperor to become the ethical subject, which renders the Universian somehow compatible with empire.21 Cosmopolitan discourse acquires its status of political philosophy of empire with Marcus Aurelius’s appropriation of the term,

18  Ifeoma Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 10. 19  Tamara Chin, “What is Imperial Cosmopolitanism?” Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Universal Rulers, Local Elites, and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean, Myles Lavan, Richard Payne, and john Weisweiler, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 132–133. 20  Ibid., 137–140. 21  Ibid., 141.

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which is drawn on the Socratic tradition of multi-­ belonging Kosmios, rather than Diogenes’s anti-imperial citizen (kosmopolites).22 The birth of imperial cosmopolitanism parallels, in many ways, the emergence of elite status cosmopolitan identity among the top ruling class of the Roman Empire. The revitalization of empire from the crisis of the third century CE took place through transformation of its elite leaders’ identity into cosmopolitans.23 By bestowing senate membership to hundreds of local elites, Constantine converted the senate into a transregional governing body from what was previously an institution constituted by an all (if not mostly) Italian, Rome-residing members. It was a transformation of regional identity into a global, cosmopolitan one.24 But the relation between cosmopolitanism, religion, and empire was not just monotonously imperial. As a counter-cultural movement, Christian cosmopolitanism presented a challenge to the elite and aristocratic cosmopolitics of the empire by “open[ing] room for social actors from more diverse locations.”25 Both Denise Buell and Judith Perkins pay close attention to early Christians’ reinvention of their collective identity as a new group or new race by constant use of ethnic/racial languages. If the Greek and Roman cosmopolitan identity was achievable by cultural/political/ educational practices, Christians from all over the world could come together as one trans-imperial group with single identity.26 However, Christian cosmopolitanism is in a way counter-imperial in that “they resist the elite’s repetitious configuration of an authentic human identity as one defined by education and accomplishments.”27 Diogenes’s negative cosmopolitanism is paralleled by Philo, whose cosmopolitan vision was taken up by early Christians.28 Despite its partial resemblance with Stoic cosmopolitanism (emphasis of reason), Philo’s cosmopolitanism differs from it in that it leaves no room for the inclusion of imperial ideology as it “designates a single descent group who had fol Ibid., 145.  John Weisweiler, “From Empire to World-State: Ecumenical Language and Cosmopolitan Consciousness in the Later Roman Aristocracy,” Cosmopolitanism and Empire, 189–191. 24  Ibid., 205–206. 25  Judith Perkins, Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era (New York: Routledge, 2008), 13. 26  Ibid., 29; Denise Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) 38–40. 27  Judith Perkins, Roman Imperial Identities, 30. 28  Chin, What Is Imperial Cosmopolitanism, 136. 22 23

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lowed Mosaic law in the face of exile, violence, and political regulations.29 While the early Christian literature evokes Philo’s cosmopolitanism, the term was never incorporated into “part of the formative Christian lexicon.”30 Instead, the predominant accounts of cosmopolitanism were Stoic, which is grounded in the Socratic Universian tradition rather than the Diogenic kosmopolites tradition. One of the earliest registers of Western cosmopolitanism as found in Diogenes emerged out of the specific historical context in which Sinope’s political future was at stake. Diogenes’s cosmopolitanism, Tamara Chin explicates, was a negation of imperial powers that maintained “the incompatibility of true kosmos with empire” in a political climate of “Sinope’s submission to Greek, Persian, and Alexandrian empire …. [rather than] multiethnic harmony.”31 World citizenship for Diogenes was an experience based in displacement, exilic consciousness, and negation of imperial power. The strong political refusal seeded in the early appearance of cosmopolitan vision is later absorbed and sanitized by the notion of multiple belonging—which matches the elitist imperial ideology.

The Valladolid Debate The most important development in the history of cosmopolitanism takes place at the dawn of modernity, along with Europe’s first encounter with the “New World.” The colonial encounter raised a key question that can be divided into two interrelated questions. The first one regarded the legitimacy of the Spanish Crown’s activities in the New World. Was the colonists’ violent treatment of Indians and occupation of their land justifiable? The second question was about the Indians’ humanity, for violence against Indians was unjustifiable only in as much as the Indians had the same equal status of humans as the Europeans. These questions were both juridical and theological in nature at the same time. Meanwhile, the status of Africans affected by slavery—which had begun under the leadership of the neighboring nation of Portugal at the time of the debate—did not seem to be considered as a topic of consideration. Bartolome de Las Casas,

 Ibid.  Ibid. 31  Ibid., 143. 29 30

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the staunch advocate of the Indians’ rights, initially proposed replacing the native labor force with African slaves—a position he later changed.32 At stake was the future of Europe’s colonial enterprise in the Americas. The reinvention of cosmopolitanism by renaissance humanists renders cosmopolitanism inseparable from the notion of the human. The coupling of cosmopolitanism with humanity is not new since for the Greeks too, cosmopolitan discourse was, in a way, a philosophical response to the question about humanity. The Stoics’ association of reason with the cosmopolitan is due to the fact that they viewed reason as the fundamental parameter of human beings.33 The Renaissance humanists of sixteenth-­ century Spain inherit the Greek notion of reason as the key faculty of humanity. But how does one prove that Indians possessed reason? Even if one proved their possession of reason, questions remain about the “sufficiency” of their reason and whether it is the “right” kind of reason. The vital sign, for the humanists, was property ownership and freedom. Property ownership and freedom are inseparably tied to each other in that the former is a determining proof of the latter. The absence of the notion of property ownership indicates the inability of self-governance, thus lack of freedom. The prototype of a liberal-secular human subject can be glimpsed in the exchanges between the late-Renaissance scholars for whom “property and its protection define[s] the person,” that is “the proper subject of all freedoms and rights.”34 The mid-sixteenth-century Valladolid debate brings together all of the above questions, in which theologians and juridical scholars engaged in a series of exchanges regarding the humanity of Indians. In response to Bartolome de las Casas who defended the humanity of Indians, Renaissance humanist and theologian Juan Gines de Sepulveda declared Indians subor less than human by adopting Aristotle’s theory of Natural Slavery, thus 32  The colonial politics of racialization operates under similar logic on various racial groups and contexts. It is important to note, however, that Africans and people of African descent have been historically excluded from the conversations about humanity. See, Eyda Merediz and Veronica Salles-Reese, “Addressing the Atlantic Slave Trade: Las Casas and the Legend of the Blacks,” in Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Bartolome de Las Casas, Santa Arias and Eyda Merediz, eds. (New York: The Modern Languages Association of America, 2008), 177–186. 33   Martha Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism,” The Journal of Political Philosophy Vol 5, No 1, 1997:6–7. 34  Talal Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” Is Critique Secular: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, eds. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 22.

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advancing it as the basis for his Just War theory. For Sepulveda, the sign of Indians’ incomplete humanity was evidenced in their lack of both reason and the notion of property ownership: Compare then those blessings enjoyed by Spaniards of prudence, genius, magnanimity, temperance, humanity, and religion with those of the little men in whom you will scarcely find even vestiges of humanity, who do not only possess no science but who also lack letters and preserve no monument of their history except certain vague and obscure reminiscences of some things on certain paintings. Neither do they have written laws, but barbaric institutions and customs … they do not even have private property.35

The association of humanity with freedom, reason, and property ownership was widely prevalent among the Renaissance humanists of the time. Such ideas were not only used against the Indians, but also in defense of their rights too. In order to defend Indians’ humanity, the influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist Francisco de Vitoria, who is also the founder of the School of Salamanca, recognizes them as “rightful owners of their property.”36 Even though Vitoria did not live to be a part of the debate, his writings occupy an important place in these conversations as it was his disciples (including Las Casas) who came to the defense of Indians’ humanity. Vitoria was convinced that the Indians had a full use of reason. Their laws, forms of governance, commerce, and religion were proofs of it.37 Vitoria’s defense of Indians’ humanity and rationality left him with the dilemma of rationalizing the Spanish dominion. His solution was to turn to the Roman concept of dominium and unpack the two meanings associated with it: jurisdiction and ownership. The Spanish activity in the Americas could be viewed as a legitimate exercise of human freedom over lawfully acquired property and such rights were ultimate signs of rational humanity.38 35  Juan Gines de Sepulveda, Tratado Sobre las Justas Causas de la Guerra contra los Indios, (Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1996), 105–113, cited in Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 47. 36  Martti Koskenniemi, “Empire and International Law: The Real Spanish Contribution,” The University of Toronto Law Journal, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Winter 2011),13. 37  Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 68. 38  Koskenniemi, Empire and International Law, 16.

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The concern for free exercise of rights on private oversea property becomes the basis of Vitoria’s international law and sovereignty. If the exercise of dominium on oversea property was the Natural rights of rational humanity, exchange between human beings was also Natural law, which makes one human. It indicates Indians’ ability for self-governance. Vitoria calls this quality the “right of natural partnership communication” (naturalis societas et communicationis) by drawing on the Greek notion of hospitality. By calling such right Natural law, cosmopolitan hospitality is converted into a right under Ius gentium (law of nations): “It is considered inhuman to treat travelers badly without some special cause, humane and dutiful to behave hospitality to strangers.”39 The first system of modern international law and cosmopolitanism is born out of this juridico-­ theological concern for colonial governance. If they denied Europeans’ access to their land, “the Indians were refusing to be loved and hence violating the law of nature.”40 This way, modern cosmopolitanism is inherently conditioned by the proto-liberal notion of humanity established by Renaissance theologians. The prevalence of elitist tendency in contemporary cosmopolitan discourse can be attributed to the fact that cosmopolitanism operates within the parameters of the human subject established by a particular modality. It is this notion of self-possessed liberal subject that has determined the dominant understanding of both the human and multiple belonging. But the secular-liberal subject of enlightenment modernity was not created out of power-neutral vacuum. Rather, as Sylvia Wynter claims, it was over against the enchanted and irrational colonial other that made Europe’s reinvention of itself in secular-liberal term (as opposed to the theocratic power of the Church) possible. The birth of the liberal-secular subject cannot be separated from the colonial construction of the racialized other in which the native/black became the secular embodiment of original sin (ontological lack), the lack of being.41 The juridical discussions molding the contours of cosmopolitanism conceal the theology of dominium, which reveals numerous important colonial issues such as the exploitation of labor, appropriation of property, 39  Anthony Pagden, “Human Rights, Natural Rights, and Europe’s Imperial Legacy,” Political Theory, Vol. 31, No. 2 (April 2003), 185. 40  Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 77. 41  Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003), 275–282.

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and freedom of movement and trade, among many others. The birth of colonial modernity and its conception of the human took place upon proto-liberal concepts that frame the grammar of modern political thought. Its theologico-political implications require an in-depth examination, which goes beyond the scope of this chapter. But the colonial political theology undergirding the Valladolid debates reveals that the highly cherished notion of freedom and equality grounding the notion of humanity not only obscures but necessitates the brutality of violence inflicted on the non-/less-than humans.

Fanon and Negative Cosmopolitanism: A Rehumanizing Project The French-Martinique born philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon offers critical insights for rethinking the terms of Eurocentric cosmopolitanism and articulating cosmopolitanism as negation. Fanon is not usually read through the lens of cosmopolitanism, but it is far from difficult to find in his thought a strong vision of cosmopolitan ontology, which serves as the ground for the Pan-African or Pan-human solidarity that he calls for. Fanon calls his own project of decolonization the creation of new humanity. The universal modality of the human is a masquerade of particularism imposed upon the rest, namely, the European ideal of “humanity as incarnated in the Western bourgeoisie.”42 The Western bourgeois humanity operates at the expense of dehumanization of non-Westerners. The Western ideal of Man, Fanon writes, is “only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.43 Any effort to define one’s humanity within such terms of humanity fails to break from the theologico-­ political machine, the necropolitical sovereign, who, as Achille Mbembe has articulated acutely, offers flourishing life for some while distributing death for others.44 This is why Fanon’s call for decolonization is also at the same time a call for reconsideration of humanity: Today we are present at the stasis of Europe. Comrades, let us flee from this motionless movement where gradually the dialectic is changing into the logic of equilibrium. Let us reconsider the question of mankind. Let us  Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 163.  Ibid., 311. 44  Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1 (2003):11–40. 42 43

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reconsider the question of cerebral reality and of the cerebral mass of all humanity, whose connections must be increased, whose channels must be diversified and whose messages must be re-humanized.45

Fanon’s call to break from the “motionless dialectic” is a reference to his critique of Hegelian dialectic in his early work, Black Skin, White Masks. The key element that drives the dialectic for Hegel is recognition as is well demonstrated in his famous master-slave dialectic. But for Fanon, the trope of recognition fails in the colonial context in which the master finds the slave laughable rather than seeking recognition from him.46 The progressive cycle of dialectics comes to a halt in the colony as the dialectical subject deems the colonial other unrecognizable: dialectic becomes motionless. Decolonization in this context is a call to the politics of recognition, not in the terms of bourgeois humanity that “invit[es] the sub-men to become human,” but by seeking to create a new human out of oneself, by way of rehumanizing the dehumanized.47 Thus, he writes, “decolonization is truly the creation of new men.”48 Humanity is redefined by Fanon, from a static signifier to a self-making action. Decolonizing ontology consists of liberating the human from the static notion of being, thus, as Sylvia Wynter puts it, re-conceiving  it no longer as a noun, but a verb.49 The human is not the ultimate goal. Fanon’s humanism refuses static or teleological determination: “The thing colonized becomes a man through the very process of liberation.”50 Being a human is an ongoing process, a movement and praxis of liberation. Fanon’s call for a new conception of humanity is a cosmopolitan project in that his ideal of humanity is one that transcends the particularities of race, gender, and nationality. One of the many reasons why Fanon kept a critical distance from the negritude movement despite the deep influence it had over his own thoughts is the limitations that black essentialism and cultural nationalism presented. The recourse to an essentialist nativism that some of the leading figures of negritude advocated was, for Fanon,  Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 314.  Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 220. 47  Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 163. 48  Ibid., 2. 49  Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, Katherine McKittrick, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 23. 50  Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 2. 45 46

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“renounc[ing] the present and future in the name of a mystical past.”51 The future Fanon envisions is cosmopolitan. Nationalist identities are key for decolonization but they are not the ultimate goal of decolonial movement. Rather, the goal is a broader pan-African solidarity, and ultimately, a humanity open to all which does not exclude the oppressor: “The new relations are not the result of one barbarism replacing another barbarism, of one crushing of man replacing another crushing of man. What we Algerians want is to discover the man behind the colonizer; this man who is both the organizer and the victim of a system that has chocked him and reduced him to silence.”52 His cosmopolitan vision is one that is born with the negation of the universalizing imperial cosmopolitan order which reifies a normative notion of humanity at the expense of the dehumanization of others. Becoming a cosmopolitan is a matter of negating the colonial cosmopolitan order and its humanism which hide the political theology funding the (neo)colonial management of labor, profit, and regulation of life. Fanon’s discussion of humanity ends with his claim for a cosmopolitan future: “We want an Algeria open to all, in which every kind of genius may grow.”53 Like the modern liberal conception of humanity which is based in individual freedom and property ownership, Fanonian humanity too conceives freedom as key to the essence of humanity. But Fanonian freedom differs significantly from the liberal understanding of freedom as an individualized, autonomous agency. Freedom, for Fanon, is inconceivable outside of the collective vision of liberation. Freedom is not a matter of individualized choice and agency, a self-possessed subject determined by his/her ownership of private property and participation in the economy of production and free exchange. Rather, freedom for the colonized being is abyssal—a terrifying freedom that stares back at the colonized self. The question of the human, Fanon describes, is a constant challenge haunting the self: “Have I not, because of what I have done or failed to do contributed to an impoverishment of human reality? Have I at all times demanded and brought out the man that is in me?”54 Freedom signifies an  act of duty, a duty to fight the forces that dehumanize one’s existence, a duty to fight for the life and rehumanization of not only oneself, but others.  Fanon, Black Skin, 16.  Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 32. 53  Ibid. 54  Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 3. 51 52

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Conclusion Contemporary cosmopolitanism has inherited the fundamental tenets of liberal humanism, which has its roots in colonial and imperialist visions. The notion of freedom (of movement and exchange) it advocates reifies the renaissance humanists’ definition of the human—the normative ideal of self-possessed Man who operates at the expense of the deaths of less-­ than-­human others. This leads to the birth of the colonial discourse at the dawn of modernity, soon materialized by the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit, guaranteeing free movements of Christian Europe on non-European soils resulting in the formation of the Modern World System (capitalism). It is out of such trajectory that the development of modern liberal political philosophy takes place, culminating in the advancement of social contract theory, which operates on the politico-theological logic of exception/exclusion. Diogenes’s cosmopolitanism is a negation of his subsumed status to Greek imperial cartography as well as his status as a slave. It is the negation of his sub/non-human status in a time where Sinope’s historical situation was marked with a series of imperial occupations by Persian and Greek powers. Evoked as a negation, cosmopolitanism articulates a form of disavowal that signals both rejection of imperial politics and commitment to the politics of self-creation and home-making. Diogenes’s negative cosmopolitanism finds resonance in Fanon who refuses to accept his sub/ non-human status by rejecting the imperial cosmopolitan order and its regulatory conception of humanity. Imperial cosmopolitanism hides its colonial political theology, which reifies a normative notion of the human based on property ownership, exchange, and profitability. Such definition has driven the creation of a Manichean world order in which the appropriation and exploitation of disposable lives (the colonial world) guarantee flourishing life for only a select few (The white Christian Europe). By disarticulating the notion of the human from its liberal-colonial theology, Fanon shows us another possibility of cosmopolitanism in which the human is an open-ended site of contention driving trans-local solidarity against the forces of dehumanization. Since its founding, Christianity has always been constitutively cosmopolitan. But a large part of its trajectory has been overshadowed by the history of co-opting with the imperial cosmopolitan agenda. Rethinking cosmopolitanism in light of the lost tradition of negative cosmopolitanism

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inscribed in ancient Greece and the early Christian movement opens up new perspectives for envisioning a Christianity able to inspire decolonial movements. The early Christians who appropriated Rome’s cosmopolitan identity presented themselves as the other of empire. They were driven by an eschatological vision—a counter-imperial vision that foresaw the end of the world. Likewise, Fanon resists the political theology of necropolitics with an eschatological vision. The creation of new men will take place only by bringing an end to the colonial order in which “[t]he last shall be first.”55

 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 2.

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CHAPTER 10

Inversion and Diasporas: Decolonizing Racialized Sexuality Transnationally Matilde Moros

My work explores decolonizing a multifaceted construction of sexuality, by uncovering colonial1 Latin American constructions of race and gender, in dialogue with how religion has been a force of this construction. For Christian Liberation Theologies, in a process of building a critique to theologies that identified with power structures, including the development and critique represented in the Indecent Theology of Marcella Althaus-­ Reid, “the poor” became a category of subjects without the multilayered ways in which such a broad category was constructed in the context of Latin America. By excluding race even in Althaus-Reid’s treatment of the sexuality of the poor, I contend that Liberation Theology, if it is a decolonization project, dismisses how systems of power in Latin America were constructed on the backs of black and brown people, their labor and exploitation through a violent sexual history which continues to affect

1  Quijano, Anibal. Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology. June 2000. Vol. 15 (2): 215–232. SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi).

M. Moros (*) Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_10

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how black and brown women especially, as well as other minoritized genders, figure in the critique of power structures. The decolonial turn as explained by Dussel, Rivera-Pagán and Marcos, does not always necessarily correlate with how cultural anthropologist Peter Wade outlines this racialized oppressive structure we have called Latin America in his text Race and Sex in Latin America because of the role that religion, Christianity in particular, played in the very race-making of the Latin American experience. I contend that the multifaceted reality of gender and sexuality as construed by the Christianization efforts of the Iberians began the transmodern colonial enterprise and are intricately interwoven beginning with the conquest and through colonization with racialized power dynamics. Though Silvia Marcos writes about a pan indigenous recovery of cosmologies as part of decolonizing effort, there is another population of colonized “original” Latin American peoples that is also engaging in a decolonial practice of organizing and resisting further negation and erasure—the Afro-Latin American diaspora. If Latin America2 as an idea or a concept was not formed until the colonial enterprise began, then original peoples are not only the indigenous pre-Columbian peoples, but also the millions of Africans trafficked into the Latin American experience and that eventually comprised in places like the Caribbean, South, Central and North America, a majority of labor populations. Racialized “othered” people, whose life, labor and embodied experiences made up much of what built Latin American and global markets in the capitalist markets that developed from the project of the “new world” or the idea of Latin America, aided in the construction of a new paradigm in which modernity and coloniality shared the same beginnings and in which the imagination of European empire building rulers controlled who was included as members of humanity itself.3 I teach university humanities students and graduate theological students in the United States, many of whom are people of diaspora. Of these, many are first- and second-generation Latinx students who recognize race as the primary way in which they are identified in the north, but as a population that has been blended into one large culture of racial similarities and very little differentiation. My Afro-Latinx students in particular have deep diaspora questions about blackness in Latin America. By 2  Mignolo, Walter D. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, Oxford, Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 1–51. 3  Dussel, Enrique. Epistemological Decolonization of Theology, 7.

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­ fro-­Latinx, I mean Puerto Rican, Dominican, Colombian, Honduran, A Belizean, Brazilian, Venezuelan, and so on; people who while being raised in the United States are seen as black, but while being raised by Latin Americans are not given ample tools of analysis to understand their own identities, because their parents somehow identify as white.4 To the point, as Rivera-Pagán observes, “Diasporic displacement has been an essential and historical consequence of imperial domination,” which, he states, has the “tragic outcome (of) xenophobia.”5 I would add that it includes the xenophobia within one’s self about one’s racial identity. Students have shared that how race has been learned in the parent’s experience and the student’s experience has been vastly different. At home my students express that they may experience the internalized racism of their own parents, who want to reject all things black. At the same time at school and in the general population, the only way to survive the extreme racist violence that endangers their lives daily in the United States is to align themselves with other African American populations from all of the Americas. In working with the method of counter-narrative,6 my students write about a decolonizing epistemology in relation to their lives. As such, I find that not talking about blackness is a definite problem within the conversation of decolonizing anything in Latin America. Colonial racist theology is a sexual history.7 Latin American decolonizing of sexuality is not only about whether people are binary or fluid, it is also about how race, gender and

4  The method of counter-narrative is used by my classes when we read Telling to Live by the Latina Feminist Group in a text based on “testimonio” as the way to tell one’s particular guarded story, as the counter to either a silenced history or a forbidden version of history. It is not quite ethnography or auto ethnography; it is about the places in one’s history where trauma or silence has become pivotal to one’s story. 5  Rivera-Pagán, Luis N. Towards a Decolonial Theology: Perspectives from the Caribbean. 4–5. 6  The Latina Feminist Group, Telling To Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001. The counter-narrative to a status quo narrative is based on “testimonio” as developed in community by The Latina Feminist Group; this text explains the history of testimonio in Latin America and how it is incorporated into Latina reality in the United States as a way of sharing “papelitos guardados,” or the stories that are guarded or silenced or hidden with regard to one’s identity or past. 7  See Marcella Althaus-Reid’s explanation in the text Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. The introduction begins with the premise that all theologies are sexual. Could it be that all histories of conquest and colonization are also sexual?

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class were constructed through violent sexuality and theology in Latin America. I agree with Dussel that sixteenth century theologies and the ideologies, or phenomena of empire, “modernity, Eurocentrism, colonialism and capitalism”, emerged at the same time as the “enlightenment”. This is the initial framework of decolonial work for Latin American and Latinx scholarship because the conquest of the Americas coincided with the time in which the change of epoch that stood at the edges of medieval understandings and those of the enlightenment coincided with the origins of the Latin American context.8 All of these phenomena depended on the construction of the “other,” which meant colonial subjects, but also the absolute other of African “blackness.” Rivera Pagan points out that for original peoples (P of the Americas there was historically a brief pause in the intensity of conquest to debate whether or not the alterior brown bodies of the “natives” had a human soul, and a treatise about Christianization and civilization of the “barbarians” justified empire.9 Then how was the later argument that the African enslavedpopulations did not have souls and that the body was seen as just a body, no debate about a soul?10 If Europeans had previously conceived the sexuality of Africans as naturally wild and exotic, what was new about Africans in the Americas?11 Peter Wade offers an explanation of the Iberian formation and development of the ideologies of race, which became the Eurocentric rationalization of violence based on the notion of property. In summary, he explains that what eventually led to white men in the Americas excusing licentious, often violent, sexual relations between Iberian males and African females  Dussel, Enrique. Epistemological Decolonization of Theology. 8.  Rivera-Pagán. Towards a Decolonial Theology: Perspectives from the Caribbean. 11. 10  Ibid., 12. 11   See Quijano, Anibal. Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology. June 2000. Vol. 15 (2): 215–232. SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi). Anibal Quijano, in his work about the Coloniality of Power, explains that capitalism and modernity coincided with the construction of whiteness as a superior and homogenized race. Blackness specifically was seen as backward, or the past and the old dualities of body and soul that had been philosophies (and theologies) debated and then later brought into force with the Cartesian argument of a thinking and souled body did not apply to the African. The African was an object, for the production of capital, not a subject. This means that the colonial subject excluded those dehumanized bodies of African diasporas; they were things, bodies. This is important for the discussion of sexuality in Latin America, because a violent sexuality cannot be a colonial problem unless there is a soul and mind, and specifically unless the body belongs to a person. 8 9

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was that this could not be considered a sin because white “Christian” men considered African women to be their property.12 As property, Anibal Quijano has explained that in the “coloniality of power” the bodies of Afro-descendants were not humanized, rather objectified as bodies without a soul, and procreation also meant soulless property.13 Sexuality between Iberian men and non-Iberian others was not considered a relation between people of the same race, as purity of blood, a concept conceived previously with regard to “limpieza de sangre,” was a method of ethnic cleansing that only benefited Iberian Christians as pure in blood. This meant they considered that only they were clean and decent, while others were unclean and indecent. Mixed race sexuality then was about the taboo of erotic bodies, where indecency taboo also meant erotic desire, including homoerotic desire of darker peoples who were racialized as inferior and also unclean as well as natural seducers. Wade explains the different notions of a naturally erotic and unclean, but always available, body and what came later as a violatable body. Men and women were violated. A notion of conquest and dominion allowed for sexual violence, as well as a notion that the conquered others practiced a sexuality that was hyper sexual and hyper erotic, with ideas of gender that might not align with the hierarchies of sex that the Iberians imposed. Both men and women who were objectified as racialized objects suffered sexual violence as a means of being dominated but what made a difference: the notion of property.14 Thus, sexual relations between Iberian males and African females were accepted normatively in the same way as were power/sexual relations with indigenous women: these enslaved bodies were property that belonged to Iberians.15 Wade explains that though the first Africans in the Americas were initially male, with the introduction of African females, blackness also meant enslaved property as a category initially applied to the offspring of African females. As property, the African slaves had no legal or church protection, and sexual abuse would go on unpunished. Wade further details that while scholars generally agree that force was widely used in sexual encounters between white men and indigenous and African women, there were also instances in which a differently constructed sexuality was in place. That is true of the “mulatta,” or the “black sable” in various parts  Wade, 2009. 96.  Quijano, 2000. 220. 14  Wade, 2009. 113. 15  Ibid., 71. 12 13

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of Latin America and the Caribbean who were constructed as sexually idealized erotic others, and that these were then identities of blackness that could have been used by black women to seduce and to survive in the slave system. Such identities could also be a form of resistance through which violence could possibly be avoided and benefits received; black women, to survive, in resistance, deliberately fulfilled roles of blackness and specifically black female sexuality as imagined within the white male ideology.16 Violence in the construction of blackness, as Mignolo and Quijano have pointed out in their various respective essays about race and the coloniality, that began in the sixteenth century, was the first of its kind. It may have followed the ethnic cleansing of the 1492 expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Spain, and it may have been religiously justified according to Christian (mis) interpretations of the ‘curse of Ham’.17 Racist abuse of black women in particular has led to these roles of the black sable or the temptress “mulatta,” but these very roles have also been identified as modes of resistance to the racist structures and seen in scholarship in the twenty-first century. Racism and the resistance to this are ways of classifying gender and sexuality as having been central concerns to the practice of slavery, and moved the anti-slavery movement and post-slavery societies to current social movements led by black power or liberation as a motivation.18 In her study about citizenship in the Caribbean, Mimi Sheller states that the struggle is to become seen as a fully human person, and the work of human rights has also led to the work of civil rights in many places, so that full citizenship rights can include full participatory rights.19 Sheller further explains that this theorizing about a new form of citizenship is a concept that she calls “from below,” which she describes as not only a category that includes the marginalized but also an identity that is “self-­ fashioning.”20 If inversions, the way Dussel describes in a decolonial history and theology, must have us locate ourselves in a new locus, a space from which we do our new interpretations of theology, then Sheller’s “below” as a racialized erotic and embodied place might be where we  Wade, Peter. Race and Sex in Latin America. London: Pluto Press, 2009. 72–73.  Mignolo, Walter D. (2008). Racism as We Sense It Today. PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 123(5), 1737–1742. 18  Sheller, Mimi. Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012. 26. 19  Ibid., 27–31. 20  Ibid., 33. 16 17

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must think of our “locus enuntiationis.”21 Sheller describes “below” as: “the subordinate, the common people, and the subaltern, but also the lower body, the vulgar, the sexual, the impure and the forbidden.”22 When we realize that in almost the first two decades of the twenty-first century we have heard in the news the high rates of mortality for women and girls in Latin America, and we note that they are the highest in the world, and that these in many ways are poorer women of color, we can say that the “locus enuntiationis” for our philosophies and theologies of a liberating decolonization must be the racialized sexual violence that so many continue to experience, unto death.23 This is precisely the silenced and subordinate place where a decolonized theology and sexuality must enunciate, celebrate and acknowledge first in an anti-racist approach to ourselves, as inheritors of a racist sexuality, theology and coloniality. The Caribbean is a particularly interesting place to begin the overview of some of the social movements developing in Latin America around decolonial and anti-racist work. As Rivera-Pagán describes, the beginning of the colonialism that began in 1492 started in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico being the oldest of these colonies. But the Caribbean is not only what the Spanish conquered and colonized, but a meeting place for so many of the colonial powers and a mixture of many ways in which anti-­ African racism and Afro-American resistance reside. The context of diaspora, as described by Rivera-Pagán in the relation between Biblical New Testament contexts and the contexts of those whose plight began in 1492 and continue today, is the relation between the transnational diasporas that both in place and in migration are “in search of God and solidarity.”24 How is the social makeup of a racialized Caribbean not about the racialized social makeup of Brazil, or Venezuela, or Colombia or Panama, or Mexico, or any other Latin American territory? How is the coloniality of power not about dominating women, black women, brown women, mixed heritage, non-heteronormative or politically engaged women? The coloniality of power, as Quijano has pointed out, is dependent on the labor of the populations of those whose bodies were objects, not  Dussel, 14.  Sheller, 33. 23  Molinatti, F., & Acosta, L. (2015). “Trends in mortality by assault in women in selected countries of Latin America,” 2001–2011. Pan American Journal of Public Health, 37(4–5), 279–286. 24  Rivera-Pagán, 6. 21 22

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s­ubjects of the colonial enterprise.25 If we were to invert theology, we would need to invert “special and temporal arrangements of bodies and places” allowing them to be fully belonging.26 How might we be in solidarity with the struggles of people for whom the colonial arrangements of power dynamics have only meant centuries of being seen as disease, crisis, subversives and others?27 Is it possible that in the twenty-first century, Latin Americans continue to read the realities of “the poor” only in terms of economic marginalization as if, as Dussel states, the four phenomena, which include capitalism, were not the root causes of the emergence of what became considered civilization? A society in which racialization happened in a way that the construction of gender and sexual hierarchies correlated with racial and economic hierarchies does not allow for a simple decolonizing of centuries of power dynamics in which if one aspect is analyzed the others bulge out like the multifaceted construct that it is, and in which all the hidden faces of violence emerge when one type of violence is pointed out. Regarding heterosexual relations, the question of racial hierarchy and sexuality of dominant ideology, the white dominant male is not always the model of the relationship made possible in the conquest and colonization histories of Latin America. Instead, we must include other possibilities, such as the ambivalence with which consensual relations across races and genders might have occurred. How race and sex were constructed in Latin America included not only relationships between male and female, but also a fluidity of multiple genders, racial mixes and sexualities. We must also note that historical primacy belongs to imposed binary cis-hetero masculine sexualities of the supremacy system that is the phenomena of modernity, capitalist, Eurocentric and colonial epistemology that Dussel outlines. Rape, the violent sexual violation by Iberian men, enters the discourse of decoloniality from the indigenous women’s perspective, and from the African women’s perspective, and also from the indigenous and African men’s perspectives, because rape was used to control both female and male slaves, and I argue that this sexual violence is the starting point for the loci of enunciation from which the decolonial discourses, theological or not, must begin.  Quijano, 221.  Sheller, 37. 27  See Trigo, Beningno. Subjects of Crisis: Race and Gender as Disease in Latin America. Hanover & London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. 25 26

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Although there was a great variety of inter-racial sexual arrangements, rape, coercion and abuse were widespread and the context in which all relationships existed was, of course, structured by racial and gender hierarchy, but various kinds of consensual relationships did exist including marriage, concubinage and casual consensual sex.28 The meaning of consensual relationships in this context is problematic in that the ambiguous category of mixed or dubious background, meaning not pure of blood, meant that the sexualization of the ambiguously raced person was at the same time one of desire and one of fear.29 Thus, “consensual” meant that coercion might not be necessary, but that the negotiations of power in the relationships depended on the fetishes, the idea of the forbidden and “indecent” sexuality of the racialized other and the power that might be received from the racialized supremacy of the powerful. Wade however does note with some caution so as not to negate the violence that did exist in this process of colonization, that sexuality as a mutually arranged and beneficial way of relating across racial and gender hierarchies did exist in colonial Latin America. Meaning, not only a heteronormative male and female married sexuality existed, but other sexual arrangements or situations were possible. Also, homoerotic relationships between white masters and black and indigenous male slaves were similar to those of white masters and women who were black or indigenous, in that they constituted power relations of various types.30 In a way, a history of masculinity and heterosexual dominance is a sexual and racial history, portraying a masculine Iberian take on what heterosexuality should be at the time of conquest and colonization. Conquest and the regulation of sexuality are very closely connected because in order to build a moral order in a conquered land, political and religious powers in Latin America also established a dominant pattern of power.31 This meant that the Inquisition, which worked on behalf of the church but also in favor of the established order of government, persecuted many women with the accusation of witchcraft, which was also associated with renegade sexuality. In the case of African and indigenous and mixed women, the accusations of witchcraft in the Americas were used to maintain a moral  Wade., 80.  Ibid., 99–112. 30  Ibid., 71–82. 31  See Quijano. A., coloniality of power concept and Mignolo, Walter’s view of a racialized order, found in articles and in his text The Idea of Latin America. 28 29

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order that benefitted masculine and heterosexual dominance. From early on in colonial Latin America, the Church expressed a close interest in sex, as it did in Europe in this period: after all, adultery and lust were mortal sins.32 The influence of the moral authority that the church provided established the dominance of the male Iberian. So, it was not just a matter of political or military domination but the church’s role in maintaining a sense of moral order through its Inquisition investigations, particularly about the sexuality of the African and indigenous and mixed peoples. Though everyone was subject to investigation and suspicion, the already influenced Iberian clerics looked upon the non-Europeans as naturally depraved and sexually immoral peoples.33 How is rape part of a heterosexual narrative of colonial history? By making marriage the standard of purity, the white woman and her honor became controlled by the white male, who also controlled all others in the society. Rape is not particularly singled out in the narrative of history; it is rather the licentious sexuality of others that is suspected. Beyond this Christian influence on the history of sexual relations, in Latin America this history also includes violating religions and cultures of indigenous peoples and the African peoples but also historically, the multiple religions that were represented in the Iberian Peninsula aside from Christianity, well before the conquest and colonization of the Americas took place. The ‘conversos,’ or forced converts from Judaism, as well as Muslims, Romani and others believed to have pagan beliefs, were always suspected of being disguised pagans. Consequently, suspecting everyone and regulating everyone’s sexuality was one way of regulating the society in general. Rape was one of a number of sexual sins, but more often than not, it was women and not men who were accused of promiscuity. After all, the ruler can make the rules.34 Hybridity and Erasure become the concepts from which we might ask: where do mixed people find their roots if they are not considered European in a European colony? If marriage was used to prove and maintain racial purity and honor, then it was outside of marriage that mixed people found their roots. Intermarriage was also not only about regulating purity of blood, for after all inter-racial sexual arrangements included a variety of “informal unions, involving everything from rape to casual sex and  Ibid., 83.  Ibid., 84. 34  Ibid., 85–88. 32 33

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l­ong-­term concubinage (the usual term for an informal union).” This meant that the church was not really in control of what people did sexually, or of how offspring came about. The honor of white males was measured by the virtue of their wives, daughters, and not by their own sexual liaisons with other women, even their children outside of marriage. But legitimacy of birth was important for those to whom honor and virtue mattered. Women giving birth to illegitimate children, or children born out of formal marriages, were not considered virtuous and therefore automatically of lower social status. The church was scandalized by the sexuality of those whose roots were not the virtue-heavy moralities of the dominant classes. In a report about a bishop’s visit to Venezuela, a cleric tells of the scandalous extent of concubinage (those living as concubines) and fornication, especially involving white males and non-European females. Concubinage was considered legal as well as a sin, meaning that the law and the church were at odds when it came to marriage, honor and virtue, except in the case of white women, who were the most regulated of all.35 If one’s indigenous or black heritage is negated by a racial policy, how does one affirm those roots that are negated? Marriage was possible for mestiza and other racially mixed women. The ambiguous spaces of hybrid people in the midst of racial hierarchy and the creation of a mestizaje racial identity meant that strategies of resistance to racial policies may have affirmed roots of mixed heritage and not necessarily those of African or indigenous roots. But if sexuality was always a factor in the creation of Latin American cultures, much of that creation was based on the making of a fetish or commodity of particular sexual ideals. One sexual ideal, or fetish, was the mulatta ‘temptress,’ primarily, as well as the commodification of women of other racial mixtures. Darker skinned women, of ambiguous racial mixture, mulatta or mestiza or anywhere in between, were highly desirable sexually. The European male was maintained as an ideal male, and the European female was idealized as a marriage partner; in these ways European heritage was affirmed. Non-European heritage was idealized only sexually. Through the myth of that ideal the non-European roots were emphasized and only seen as good in a sexual way, otherwise the non-European heritage was considered inferior. Sexuality was both a way for the dominant groups to control the masses of mixed heritage people as well as a way for mixed heritage people to control the dominant  Ibid., 89–92.

35

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ideology. The idea of a racial democracy is therefore based on the many ways in which the strict divisions between racial categories were permeated and how many ways there were to violate strict ordinances. Intermarriages and other arrangements led to the establishment of a racially bound hybrid structure in which ambiguous definitions and strict definitions of race existed with each other simultaneously.36 To identify as a black woman or an indigenous woman would be an act of resistance,37 even if that identification was also sexual, such as being the temptress of the Iberian male.38 How does Marcella Althaus-Reid’s ethical theological approach to resistance impact how we read the liberatory history of Christianity and sexuality given the approach developed by Wade? Is the resistance found in Latin American Liberation Theology enough? Why is the introduction of sexuality as a liberative tool important for decolonizing theology? The approach introduced by Wade addresses the racial compositions of Latin Americans emphasizing sexuality. Marcella Althaus-Reid’s resistance method incorporates sexuality and gender in reading the history of the Christian thought in Latin America. Wade explains that sexuality and race together were part of the conquering and colonial method of dividing society, and that there was much violence as a result of that. But he also reminds us that there were other factors. The church regulated sexuality, enforced purity codes, and established social hierarchies. Althaus-Reid adds that the church, or rather the theology that has remained from the time of the colonial enterprise, has continued to pervade Latin American ideas about sexuality and about its own identity as a culture. In a radical twist of theological reflection, Althaus-Reid also critiques Liberation Theology, saying that it is not enough to offer a preferential option for the poor, on behalf of God, the church or theologians. It is imperative that the 36   See Medina, N. Mestizaje: (Re) Mapping Race, Culture and Faith in Latina/o Catholicism. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2009. In the chapter on the shifting shapes of mestizaje, Medina reminds us that hybridity has a patriarchal stamp on it, mostly brought about by sexual injustices against indigenous and African women. 37  See Grimes, K. Christ divided: Antiblackness as Corporate Vice. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017. 2. In the introduction, Grimes explains that in order to differentiate anti-blackness racism from all the other forms of asymmetrical relationships such as heterosexism, antiblackness “bears the imprint of black slavery,” in which men and women had to submit to their owners, sexually and in any other form of submission, including labor, talent and humanity itself. This means that the very honor and superiority gained through direct violence practiced by the Eurocentric “whiteness” was gained through anti-blackness in all of the Americas. 38  Wade., 160–190.

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voices of the poor be heard, and she equates the poor to the violated woman. She states that all theology is sexual and as such the voices of the violated poor women must be heard, and the stories of sexuality of the poor must be heard. In order for theology to be done from the perspective of the poor, we must first hear their sexual stories. If race and sexuality are linked in Latin American history as Wade has stated, then sexuality and theology are also linked as Althaus-Reid states. The question remains whether resistance is found in the sexually complex history and relations of Latin Americans, which involve racial, class and social hierarchies regulated by the church but also by the self-regulation or internalization of colonialism in what Althaus-Reid describes as “colonial souls.”39 Althaus-Reid’s ethical theological approach to resistance makes Indecent Theology innovative because it introduced sexuality to the theological conversation. The theological conversation in Latin America, as Peter Wade explained, had sexuality in it from its inception, but it was a regulatory conversation, a directive conversation from the top down, from church authorities to both colonized and colonizers. Althaus-Reid begins a conversation about indecent theology by observing that the indigenous women have “lost their narrative.” This angle on what Christian theology has done to the colonized people, especially women of Latin America, clarifies that Christianity has not only been imposed, but it has another previously existing narrative, another story of who people are. What is new about Althaus-Reid’s inclusion of sexuality from the perspective of the poor, rather than from the perspective of those condemning sexual acts, into the theological reading of Latin American identity and religious reality, is that she acknowledges that there are missing perspectives in the historical and current analyses of who the marginalized, the poor and the objects of coloniality are in many Liberation Theologies. She states that it is the everyday life of people that is the source of contextual theology.40 Particularly that “Feminist Theology in Latin America started from the concrete experience of women…,” and that it has yet to receive any acknowledgment in the same way male liberationist thinking has.41 Similarly, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz worked on the term “lo cotidiano,” which she elaborated on in several texts of hers, and of which the most poignant is that women are not taken seriously by the academy or male scholars  Althaus-Reid, 2000. 165–177.  Ibid., 30. 41  Ibid., 35. 39 40

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because “they are not thought of as having and producing knowledge,”42 particularly everyday women, poor women, working class women, and I would add, queer women, black women, indigenous women, sex workers, trans women, and so on. World views, narratives and meta-narratives combined and changed the lives of everyday people in Latin America. Furthermore, as a way of acknowledging the hybrid nature of Latin America, Althaus-Reid includes in her discussion many native American women, and the loss to their worldview, and to the way they interpreted everything, including love, and sexuality. Another example of what Althaus-Reid proposes would be Gloria Anzaldua in her text Borderlands/ La Frontera; in her queering of hybridity and multiplicity in identity, Anzaldua aims to reconstruct identity from the pieces of resistance. Anzaldua reminds us that the fear of sexuality becomes a form of homophobia, which to her is the “fear of going home.”43 This is much of what Sylvia Marcos proposed as the resistance of many indigenous women’s spirituality, a living reencounter with cosmologies, and worldviews that were not erased or destroyed, but rather remained in the recesses of society in places where living communities maintain a hybrid fluidity in which multiple worlds can co-exist.44 It is from these places that we can say that decolonizing is a queer act, a place from which, as Althaus-Reid explained, we are not expressing the odd, but rather queer represents that reality which has been denied. “Indecenting is a process of coming back to the authentic, everyday life experiences described as odd by the ideology-and mythology-makers alike. Indecenting brings back the sense of reality, and not the commonsense reality politics…”45 What is indecent? Sexuality and honor were indeed regulated by church rules, but the theological implications on decency in Latin America are much more pervasive than simply rules. Marcella Althaus-Reid explains that suffering, and specifically female suffering, is what has been regulated by a system that itself has been regulated by systematic theology. “In the conquista, women’s sufferings are a matter of

42  Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria & Eduardo Mendieta. Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. 56. 43  Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. 42. 44  Marcos, Sylvia. Mesoamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality: Decolonizing Religious Beliefs. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. Vol. 25, No. 2 (Fall 2009), pp. 25–45. 45  Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology. 71.

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economy.”46 This became a system of decency; as an economy, honor was exchanged through suffering. How that system functions in theological discourse today is through the marketing of systematic theologies and its books, through the academic work about the poor, their suffering, sometimes their death. Althaus-Reid clarified that this is a system that functions on the “logic of the centre,” for which the Latin American people are objectified merchandise, as is the theology about them. The categories of indecency are particularly troublesome when applied to the regulation of sexuality: The decency of the system lies in a network of authorization and censoring; naming merchandise as such fixes the decency of a society—for instance, the value of a person as merchandise, as the value of women in the economic markets of marriage. The Latin American system of decency which rules and regulates how women should dress, how they should speak, the sexual activities they should perform, is based on this.47

To do theology from the perspective of those who suffer, allowing for women to tell their own sexual stories, is then, by the measure of decency that has been prescribed, considered indecent. Anything that allows for discourse outside of the regulated system of decency is considered indecent. To question systematic theology’s objectification of suffering is to do indecent theology. Althaus-Reid proposes that all theology is sexual, but that indecent theology is doing theology not from a market guided approach but from the perspective of Liberation Theology, that is of those still excluded from the centers of theological production and as such in a decolonizing manner. Why is liberation not possible without recognizing the deep effects of colonization in our theology? How does one recognize the deep effects of colonization in theology? Marcella Althaus-Reid explains that there is a way of knowing, an “epistemology of the poor”; because it is a different way from the epistemology affirmed by Eurocentric systematic theology, it must have a way to break away in an insurrection away from systematic theology. The element of hope, which springs from the theology of liberation, can also be a false escape if there is no true liberation. Liberation includes revealing the effect of theology on how women see themselves. It  Ibid., 16.  Ibid., 27.

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includes acknowledging that Christian theology is an ideology when it is used to instate and reinstate patriarchal society. So liberation from colonization means: “to recognize and work with an epistemology from the poor as it is presented in feminist epistemology, non-dualistic, non-­ hierarchal and relational.”48 A fluid relationality, not a rigid binary. As a “hermeneutical strategy,” Althaus-Reid proposes an indecent theology which seeks to unmask the ideology that considers itself decent and proper, especially in regard to women’s bodies. Her proposal is that a Christology of liberation begins from the perspective of women’s bodies. Furthermore, Christology from a women’s perspective transgresses both political and religious “boundaries of oppression.”49 In this way, Althaus-Reid’s work is in conversation with decoloniality. In many ways she goes beyond Liberation Theologies by identifying particular experiences of indecency and decoloniality that dare to be, think and know outside of the imposed and accepted colonial frameworks. This is how she invites us to resist and confront a multifaceted structural violence. Particularly if we are able to understand that the feminization of “the poor” in Latin America has also meant the racialization of “the poor” through a violent sexuality that has gendered the coloniality of power in a very particular way, indigenous and decendants, African and decendants. How does she introduce coloniality? She explains what “colonial souls”50are. Marcella Althaus-Reid explains that the violence (including sexual violence) with which Latin America was conquered and colonized established a way of exclusion. In Latin America, Christian people are the descendants of mothers raped by Christians, in their bodies and in their religious beliefs, cultures, philosophical and economic systems. Christian theology performed here as an overvalued penis, in a globalization mode of international intervention and destruction of the local state, but without any of the benefits of decentralized thinking. This is our biggest contradiction: to recognize that we have a faith born of an entanglement of patriarchal traditional cultures in alliance with oppressive gendered Christian and political ideologies. Those elements are still present.51

 Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology, London: SCM, 2004, 81–82.  Ibid., 85. 50  Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 165–173. 51  Ibid., 173. 48 49

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The conversation about indecency has turned from one about the suffering of the poor to the role of women, the specificity of the sexual violence, and the spiritual effect on a subjugated people of an enforced conquering religion. In the capitalist economy, not only were bodies exchanged, so too were souls. Indeed, Althaus-Reid states that the system that replaced one meta-narrative for another is not only the Christian religion, but capitalist economy itself. The conflation of the political and religious conquest that brought the sword and cross also means that capitalism is also part of the colonial soul: “…capitalism is an embodied, incarnated theory which creates a cultural reality based on having a certain being and a certain body.”52 The question of how Christianity and capitalism have affected women, especially poor women, is answered by the creation of a colonial soul, one that stipulates the desires of subordinated women. Why is a sexual theologian seen as deviant? Indecency means that especially for poor women, many indigenous or black, the power is not only found in being transgressive, the power is in difference. Indecency theology can deviate through the “disarticulation of the male elite discourse such as Christology, to the extent that the Theology of Liberation cannot do.”53 A sexual theologian is deviant because the body and the sexual experience, especially a female sexual theologian’s view, function as a theological starting point instead of continuity, creating discontinuity. As part of this process, the location of areas of exclusion in theology is one of crucial importance; for instance, poverty and sensuality as a whole (and not as separate units) has been marginalized in theology. A theology from the poor needs also to be a sexual theology, a theology of economics and desires that have been excluded from our way of ‘doing theology’ as a second act.54

Doing theology from a new place, from the silenced places, means doing it from areas that if talked about were not seen as a place of encounter with God, but as a place from which denouncing others in the name of God could happen. Sexuality thus is deemed a location of sin, and as such is both a location of violence and of ecclesial regulation. In this historical reality, the questions that arise from the perspective of poor female bodies  Ibid., 174.  Althaus-Reid, Marcella. From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology: Readings on Poverty, Sexual Identity and God. London: SCM Press, 2004. 85. 54  Ibid., 4. 52 53

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and their experience of sexuality are locations from which new questions rise up for theology. This is the challenge Althaus-Reid poses; questioning the hermeneutics used even by liberation theologians that continue to revolve around constructions of gender, questioning theology that takes for granted a particular reading, identity erasing sexuality, and race. Though Althaus-Reid moves forward with her thought and provocative theology regarding the case for theology as a sexual act, there is a limitation in her theology, that of the racialization, not only feminization of vast majorities of Latin America’s poor. As theologians, many trained in the sociological or other ways of studying society, the lack of racial critical studies is evident. If stories and erased histories were shared with a decolonial point of view, would the racialized sexuality of so many Latin American “Christians” require an inversion of perspective? How is telling our stories of sexuality transgressive? For Marcella Althaus-Reid, the telling of sexual stories has a central role in theology because for centuries the church has tried to compartmentalize and shape essentialist identities, identities that deliberately exclude certain aspects. She surmises that if sexual stories were the starting point from which theology can take place, then either more boxes would be needed or the church would realize that there are many more identities and types of sex than there are boxes. This is transgressive of the categories allowed by Christian theology, which tries to instill a particular order in people’s lives. Traditionally, the role of sexual stories in society has been precisely to give some sense of historical coherence to sexual lives, or a claim to a genealogy of “natural” behavior.55 For Althaus-Reid, this is where the crux of the matter lies, in that there is no natural behavior when it comes to human sexuality, and that the church has attempted to naturalize some sexual behaviors while shaming others. Beyond shaming, the church also punishes (sometimes with violence) people for transgressing the bounds of this purported “natural” but actually heterosexual sexuality, which she insists is an “unstable category.”56 In telling stories about one’s sexual experiences, the transgression occurs in many areas: the categories shift, the control and regulation over women’s bodies become even more evident, the licentious abuses of those in dominant positions in society become exposed, and theology becomes contextualized as a Christological category, where God becomes incarnate in the bodily experience of those  Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 132.  Ibid., 69.

55 56

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who are made in the image of God, a perverse theology she states, if what is natural is the imposition of heterosexuality mandated by a straight God.57 Indecent Theology is a call for a deviant Sexual Theology, which would challenge the normalcy of women’s oppression in its ultimate consequences. By this, I mean that from that dialectic of decency/indecency in our lives we must think politics and theology at the same time.58 Althaus-Reid invites (all) sexual theologians, through the telling of sexual stories, to keep thinking politics and theology together, which is what the resistance to the colonialist racist rape, as described previously and interpreted through indecent/decent categories, seeks to do. Indecent theology as an ethic of resistance from a Latin American feminist perspective fittingly establishes the framework within which an ethic of resistance can be developed. Besides sexuality, what else is Althaus-Reid’s Feminist Resistance about? “Eroticism and hunger are both sites of pain and liberation,”59 states Althaus-Reid, meaning that sexuality and theology are both categories of liberation. Theology and a Christian ethic of liberation is what her feminist resistance seeks. Beyond the heterosexual binary that the church protects, what Althaus-Reid proposes is a queer theology of liberation, in which categories of both theology and sexuality are not clear cut, and where hunger and the erotic are felt both in the depths of bodily poverty and pain, as well as in rich and pleasurable experience-based resistance. In asking for all theologians to liberate their sexual ‘stories’ she plays with the word ‘stories,’ explaining how history is a series of stories, and stories make up history. In English, we use the term ‘his-story,’ but in Spanish, the feminine word historia is used for both story and history. Seen like this, she posits that history is plausibly both made up by stories as well as made into stories, so that what we tell and how we tell it become the context of theology. In this way, theology of the incarnate type is a way of revealing, and revelation and liberation become the central themes of the Jesus story. Thus, when we theologically assume a decolonizing ethic of resistance from the place of the poor, and particularly the poor and their place in Latin American his-story, the place of a ‘her-story’—the role of black, indigenous, mixed race women in the history of Latin America— becomes central to understanding the poor in Latin American history and theology. If we add to this the understanding of resistance and ­insurrection,  Ibid., 165–172.  Ibid., 179. 59  Ibid., 194–200. 57 58

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and the role that race played in the sexual histories of Latin America, then Althaus-Reid’s indecent proposal of creating a genealogy of sexual histories becomes a truly theological proposal for resistance, a decolonial diasporic organizing of multiplicities and multiplications of peoples. What particular stories we pay attention to might include the new subjects in the subversive history that is told in the twenty-first century Latin America. Stories such as that of Marielle Franco, a young Brazilian black, lesbian, poor woman growing in political power who was assassinated for her powerful truth telling.60 Stories of communities’ agency in various places in Latin America such as the diaspora in Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, and so on, all represent a new surfacing of an old resistance.61 Students in the diaspora, from wherever in Latin America, may not be dependent on their parents’ assimilation of centuries-old colonialism. Rather, broad coalitional networks are becoming available in Latin America as much as US American dialogues with the southern diaspora are growing.62 Theologically, the “every day,” “cotidiano,” “from below” departure I have developed in my argument must be our new space as Latin American and Latinx scholars. In short, our decolonizing work must begin with our own anti-racist work, our anti-anti-blackness work, our anti-sexist work.63

60  Marielle Franco was assassinated in Brazil on March 14, 2018. She was an elected official that struggled against police brutality. 61  See Dixon, Kwame & John Burdick, editors, Comparative Perspectives on Afro-Latin America. University Press of Florida: Gainesville, Tallahassee, Tampa, Boca Raton, Pensacola, Orlando, Miami, Jacksonville, Ft. Myers, Sarasota, 2012. For descriptions of various expressions of blackness in Latin America, Afro social movements and various state responses. 62  See Jane G.  Landers & Barry M.  Robinson. Slaves, Subjects and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. An entire historical text in which the social activism of African diasporic peoples throughout various parts of Latin America is highlighted, with disruption of the colonial enterprise present all along the imposing of coloniality in the Americas. This is the starting point of what now, much later in the twenty-first century, we see as social/political resistance. 63  See Tortorici, Zeb; editor. Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. In order to do anti-sexist work we must understand how sexuality out of heteronormativity was seen as “unnatural.” Many of the social movements that promote a colonial perspective today are church groups that term the antisexist work as “gender ideology.” I recommend referring to Tortorici’s text, which highlights the long history of repression.

CHAPTER 11

¡Sin maricones no hay revoluciones! (Without Queering, There’s No Revolutioneering!): Mexico’s Queer Subversions of Public Space and the Decolonization of Marriage Heteronormativity Ángel F. Méndez Montoya The approval of egalitarian marriage began as a process in Mexico City in 2009 and was later ratified by the Supreme Court of Justice in 2015. The bill issued by the Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto intended to “ensure that homosexual people can marry and form a family” is far from being an innovation, but rather complies with the law protecting our basic rights to non-discrimination and recognizes the dignity of each person. The Mexican Constitution establishes (in Article 3) a space for political conviviality in which explicitly secular educational criteria are followed, geared toward “scientific progress, the struggle against ignorance and its effects, servitude, fanaticisms and prejudice.” It is precisely under these criteria that some Mexican universities, including the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), signed a public letter to join forces with Á. F. Méndez Montoya (*) Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_11

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this struggle. Some Catholic or “Christianity-inspired” universities, such as the Universidad Iberoamericana of Mexico City (UIA) have also joined this initiative. UIA Dean, David Fernández, SJ, has made public his stance in favor of the dignity of homosexual people and our right to form families based on love and respect, independent from sexual orientation. It was precisely due to his public statements against sexual discrimination that the National Council for the Prevention against Discrimination (Consejo Nacional para Prevenir la Discriminación/CONAPRED) granted David Fernández a National Award (in November, 2016) for his struggle in favor of equality and non-discrimination. International conventions echoing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also support this law protecting our basic right to non-discrimination. The colonizing mechanism of a patriarchal and heteronormative hegemony can—at least, based on the legal niche of egalitarian marriage in Mexico—continue advancing a decolonizing process in which human rights and civic solidarity open up the public space in order to include sexually diverse people, a segment of the population that has been displaced to the margins of society’s diaspora. According to the Mexico City Constitutional bill (article 16), nobody, whether lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, transvestite or intersexual (LGBTTTI), should be treated as a second-class citizen. Therefore, members of the LGBTTTI community are entitled to legally endorsed marriage. In spite of the great achievements of a more inclusive policy, this constitutional step has unleashed strong antagonistic reactions, as well as divisive polemics and postures. Without a doubt, the approval of egalitarian marriage is a victory of the secular State over the domination of religious sectors, coming in particular from ultraconservative groups of the Catholic Church and some Evangelical churches that have firmly opposed this project of citizen inclusion. This does not imply that only practitioners of religious creeds oppose the right to egalitarian marriage and to an inclusive family model. Discrimination is also practiced within non-religious spheres. As a reminder, in Mexico the hatred toward and rejection of sexual diversity has also infiltrated social and cultural practices, whether secular or religious, that not only are charged with homophobia and male chauvinism, but are also colonized by a heteronormative ethos. If the public space policy in Mexico is supposedly ruled by a demarcation line dividing the private sphere of religion from the public sphere of the secular State, then those social interweavings, both religious and non-­ religious that proclaim themselves against the recognition and exercise of sexual diversity rights, show how porous and permeable public space actu-

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ally is. Within policies regarding public space, the private and public spheres, religion and secularism overlap and hybridize. In a country like Mexico, deeply wounded by the pathologies of homophobia and misogyny, it was not surprising to see a variety of religious people and atheists join together in a public demonstration repudiating egalitarian marriage. Although the demonstration was called by the National Family Front (Frente Nacional de la Familia/FNF)—mainly constituted by ultraconservative religious groups—it included any citizen against egalitarian marriage, whether for religious or merely secular reasons. Misogyny and homophobia do not differentiate between public and private space, thus making the line of demarcation between religion and secularity problematic. We can explore this dichotomous and mutually excluding concept between private and public space, the religious and the secular, when we look upon it from “another” perspective beyond homophobic heteronormativity. The dichotomy between public and private space is equally addressed when we analyze this topic from another perspective, from a positioning in which sexual diversity, the right to marry the person one loves, the freedom to form a family is acknowledged, included and protected. Private and public space, religion and secularity are equally co-­ implicated in a society that struggles to heal the wounds of discrimination and hate. When we recognize the existence of religious communities in Mexico that favor egalitarian marriage, who have even been important protagonists of the approval of homosexual marriages and families, the “queer,” “weird,” “extravagant” nature of public space becomes even more evident. I am referring to associations in Mexico, such as Catholic Women for the Right to Choose (Mujeres Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir), the Efeta and Magdala groups, feminist women theologians, as well as different religious organizations emerging from a diversity of traditions, such as Judaism, Buddhism, as well as those who have pronounced themselves in favor of non-discrimination. The CONAPRED as well as various national and international human rights organizations that promote the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, transvestite and intersexual people, are also constituted by representatives of different religions. The problem is that the mass media only shows the hegemonic religious sectors that perpetuate excluding and discriminatory social and political life models. The “other voices” coming from members of religious traditions that have joined the project to create a more inclusive nation and world are seldom heard. In fact, it is precisely because of their theological stance that these religious groups support organizations

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that are against discrimination. For this reason, as we are reminded by Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, among others, religion is a voice that must be included in public debates, above all if they come from critical theologies, from theological positions that struggle for a better world.1 I propose that in order to construct a public space that favors egalitarian marriage, and is inclusive of the voices of critical theologies (i.e. theologies that promote the dignity of all individuals and respectful conviviality), it will be necessary to imagine a queer political theology of public space. If at first glance we understand that the word queer, of doubtful origin, means “strange,” “odd,” “crooked,” and/or “twisted,” then what I propose is to question or “twist” the merely secular and dichotomous notion of public space. After all, public space, as we have intimated, is in no way deprived of religious components, always inclusive of a multiplicity of voices. However, instead of using a merely secular position as a lens to guide my thoughts, I would prefer a postsecular theological perspective in which religion is not excluded from public space but, rather collaborates and supports the construction of a public space that twists, criticizes and opposes all practices of discrimination as well as violence against sexual diversity. In other words, my proposal is to use a queer and decolonizing theological perspective to subvert public space. This will enable the construction of a public sphere policy based on positions and practices that protect and ensure individual rights and promote respect for people’s dignity, equity and diversity. In order to explain my understanding of queer theology (given the limitations of this paper), I would first like to digress briefly into queer theory and its influence on theology. After this excursus, the constitutional bill favoring the right to egalitarian marriage will be reviewed. My main intention is to retrieve the intrinsically political space of religion and theology in order to assume the challenge of theology’s political vocation. Of course, this theological perspective is partial, but not dogmatic. My locus theologicus is located within the field of a play on words and grammars coming from some schools of Christian theology inspired by liberation and postliberation theologies, that is, feminist, decolonizing and queer theologies. I would also like to here “twist” or “provoke” Christian theology from within in order to open up to theologies and spiritualities beyond Christianity, inviting a diversity of religious traditions to join this struggle; 1  See, Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen (eds.). El Poder de la Religión en la Esfera Pública Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2011).

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including secular positions that also struggle against a policy based on the heteronormative hegemony of public space.2

Queer Theopolitics: Subverting the Political Queer theology is a relatively recent platform that emerged from queer theories primarily under the influence of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler and other contemporary thinkers.3 As aforementioned, in English, the term queer means weird, strange, bent, twisted, extravagant and eccentric, among other acceptations. However, it is also a term expressive of contempt that has been used to stigmatize people of diverse sexualities, sexual minorities found within the diaspora of a heteronormative sphere. “Queer” is a derogatory and marginal term inasmuch as it defines the “other” from a normatively heterosexual or heteronormative stance. Since the sexual liberation movements of the 1970s, particularly in the USA and in the early times of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the LGBTTTI communities started to use the term queer in public demonstrations. During that time, the word queer “came out of the closet” and was used as an identity banner, as a sign of self-acknowledgement in public space with the intent of subverting the violence and stigma that sexually diverse people were experiencing. We are here and we are queer…! became the subversive slogan of that time. This word is not only an alternative to express an individual’s personal identity, but also a sociopolitical project that refuses to capitulate to the rule of public space with a logic of heteronormative identity, recognizing that when we speak of identity, when we position o ­ urselves as “we are here,” we must avoid speaking in absolute terms that are discriminatory and marginalizing.

2   See, for instance, within this anthology, the proposal made by Sylvia Marcos, “Decolonizing Meosamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality.” 3  See, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990); Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993); Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Donald E.  Hall, Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies (London: Routledge, 2009).

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For queer theories, the sense of identity is a complex tapestry of identity contexts: identity is racially mixed or hybrid. It is both individual and social. It is not only personal, but also interpersonal and political. It is political in the broadest sense: a complex warp and weft of individual and collective relationships primarily aimed at achieving the common good, solidarity and citizen participation. It imagines space as a polis based on agreements and laws that ensure citizen rights.4 For a queer hermeneutic, the sense of political identity even has the capacity to go beyond geopolitical boundaries. It is interesting to note that in Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, the word queer is not translated from English into Spanish, but rather is re-signified, creating a hybrid of Spanish and English. Cuir, torcido or queer is a hybrid that performs both concrete and diverse identities, constantly re-signifying by way of its own languages, cultures, contexts and cosmovisions. In order to hybridize a term, it is necessary to have a certain ability to produce terminological transformations based on linguistic elements with which multiple cognitive or epistemological combinations can be reproduced and re-signified by other genealogies, other bodies of desire.5 Transferred into Spanish, the word queer becomes a hybrid concept in an ongoing process of construction. Queer theory rejects aesthetic or absolute self-denotations, and imagines itself opening up translinguistic, transcultural and transnational boundaries. Representatives of queer theories have reversed this offensive and discriminatory word in order to raise it as a banner defending sexual diversity and the dignity of all people, independent of their sexual, gender, social, racial and religious orientations, among others. It is important to emphasize that queer theory is not only about recognition and inclusion of sexual minorities into the “corpus” of the public sphere, but also individuals, particularly those vulnerable bodies and those who are on the periphery of society, who are of equal importance. Judith Butler reminds us that, “bodies matter.” For queer theories, personal identity is intrinsically corporeal, with the understanding that corporality is not only individual, but also  Here the words “politics/policy” are used in a pluridimensional perspective that even includes promoting a relation of respect to the environment. 5  See, Brad Epps, “Retos, riesgos, pautas y promesas de la teoría queer, in Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. LXXIV, Núm. 225, Octubre-Diciembre 2009, 897–920. https:// revista-iberoamericana.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/Iberoamericana/issue/view/194/ showToc 4

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social and political. Although Butler is not a theologian, in her most recent writings, she addresses the place religion occupies in the public sphere. As a Jew, Butler questions and criticizes current Zionism (a hegemonic and invasive policy of the State of Israel). Butler “twists” this Zionist political construct of public space that excludes the “others,” not only those who are not Jewish (particularly Muslims), but even Jewish people who oppose Zionism. However, Butler argues that public space is political and queer, and therefore we must recognize people who live in the sexual, economic, social, political and religious peripheries of the diaspora. For queer theory, identity must not be understood in an essentialist, fixed or normative manner (similar to the univocal mechanism of the Western and colonial world, where it is fixed as an identity primarily defined by a heterosexual and patriarchal normative). Personal identity is performative, and is in an ongoing process of reconstruction. Some theologies emerging in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have become enriched by these discussions, promoting, among other proposals, a theology favoring inclusion beyond exclusion, celebrating diversity and co-participation instead of domination, promoting political space beyond (hetero)normativity and rivalry.6 Like queer theories, queer theology is still undergoing a process of construction, and is expressive of a multiplicity of voices without imposing a normative discourse. Personally speaking, I consider that queer theology makes an enormous contribution to discerning one’s personal identity, an identity that is both personal as it is intrinsically social and political, for it is relational and guided by civic compromises with a plurality of voices that ideally ensure the common good. Yet, people in the LGBTTTI sectors of societies—particularly in Mexico—still predicate an identity that is fragile and at risk. Queer thinking suggests new ways of performing personal and interpersonal identities, which are plural, inclusive and caring. From a biblical perspective, for example, Saint Paul foresees a new sense of identity that goes beyond the ego or the self, an identity that emerges from self-­ dislocation, that comes out of the closet, so to speak, and has a reencounter in the Other, in Christ, in such a way that in Christ, there is “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female” (Gal 3:28). Nature does not have a defining and static character, since it flows 6  See Gerard Loughlin (Ed), Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), and Patrick S. Cheng, Radical Love. An Introduction to Queer Theology (New York: Seabury Books, 2011).

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or is poietic (a kind of crafted creation). It is re-configured by an extravagant Christic love that embraces and loves all those who are different. In the New Testament, for Paul of Tarsus bodies also matter. Each body part and each corporeal location matters, both to the personal body and the collective corpus to such an extent that when a body part, however insignificant, suffers, the whole body suffers. The body matters both in the personal and interpersonal spheres. Given the individual and community participation taking place in performative gestures of acknowledgement, love and mutual caretaking, Christic identity becomes political or theopolitical. To be queer or extravagant in this theopolitical sense of identity results from the paradox of unity within diversity, a paradox that also has a Trinitarian resonance, referring to an intrinsically relational and communitary God. God is koinonia, communion, where one is an intrinsic part of the other. The love of each divine person is inscribed in the other, producing a dance, a perichoresis, expressive of excessive love that overflows and is shared through the Other. From a theological perspective, creation expresses this gesture of excessive divine love that emerges from God and creates, turning creation into a participatory sign of a performative act of divine love. In this perichoretic dance between I and the other, between immanence and transcendence, neither materiality, nor corporality, nor desire are nullified. Instead, they intensify, given their participation within divinity which engages with history, and more radically incarnates in humankind, simultaneously integrating humankind and divinity. It is no surprise that “eros” and body are topics that queer theology visits extensively. Personal and social identities in themselves are both corporeal and desirous, ecstatic (ek-stasis). Desire manifests pleasure in and by the other, other bodies and other spaces, which are free from a violent logic, and which celebrate and promote a desire dynamic that goes beyond competition, a desire that is free from rivalry and exclusion.7 From this queer theological perspective, God comes out of the closet of self-confinement in order to engage in history, in order to incarnate and express deep desire and pleasure for the whole of creation, without exclusions. I believe it is necessary to point out that God’s desire is queer, extravagant, absolutely Other. Nonetheless, God creates and loves 7  See, Genilma Boehler et  al. (eds.), Teorías Queer y Teologías: Estar… En Otro Lugar (Costa Rica: Editorial DEI, 2013).

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­ ifference, gives Him/Herself in order to lovingly relate with Otherness. d Queer theology celebrates a desirous God, who first desires us, lovingly desiring to create and share His/Her love with humankind. Jesus Christ is expressive of God coming out of the closet, “un-decenting” the social spheres of his time.8 Jesus “twists” the political structures of a society founded on policies that exclude all those who are considered “indecent” and are relegated toward the periphery or the margins of public space: sinners, drunkards, lepers, women, foreigners, prostitutes, and so on. Jesus transited through diasporic spaces, revealing himself to side with the indecent. He does not reject, but rather appreciates, desires and loves the company of people constrained in subaltern spheres. In fact, Jesus identifies with the “others” in society, above all those on the peripheries (Mt 25); Jesus incarnates in those bodies located in diasporic spaces. This desire is deeply Eucharistic, since it bursts into the sphere of that which has been created, in order to offer itself as nourishment, in order to commune with us and form part of our body, thus transforming us into the mystical body of God. It is here that a policy of desire emerges: upon knowing that we are desired by God, we acknowledge ourselves as beloved beings and we respond to this divine desire, sharing with others the infinitely abundant and generous love of God within us, without excluding anyone nor exercising any violence. The fact that “I am” is rooted in this encounter with a God that calls me “beloved,” “delight.” For a theological insight of divine excess, love emerges from God and in that same divine love, the whole of creation transforms into the corpus of a celebratory polyphony. It is because of this extravagantly inclusive love that political theology is challenged to break down the walls that separate one from the other. It is queer desire and love which, in view of its emergence from a divine excessive gift, imagines and promotes a performative theopolitic of solidarity, un-decenting all those acts of violence and domination that confine both individuals and societies in subaltern spaces.9

8  See Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000). 9  This is an edited version of Ángel F. Méndez Montoya’s article, “Amor radical, identidades en flujo. Alternativas teológicas para una sanación queer,” published in Revista Sofias, Mexico City, Year 1, No. 2, May–August 2015, pp. 35–43, and Ángel F. Méndez Montoya, “Deseo, sacrificio y eucaristía: más allá de la anorexia mimética,” in Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez (comp), Caminos de paz. Teoría mimética y construcción social. Mexico City, Universidad Iberoamericana, 2016, pp. 217–231.

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Toward a Queer Theopolitic of Public Space Let’s now take some key elements of this queer theological perspective, which I have briefly presented in order to thus imagine and set forth an alternative that may allow us to construct a political performance, a vital staging of public space that is not ruled by exclusion policies, nor hatred or violence. A hermeneutic that is simultaneously theological and political—theopolitic—may well promote public space inclusive of minorities and religious groups with a critical and fighting spirit that struggle for a more inclusive country and planet. We require that imagination be exercised as an act of discernment and that it may foresee concrete legislative bills and everyday practices of solidarity-based conviviality, aware that the world is currently facing crushing spheres of power, from Brexit to Donald Trump, that perpetuate the lengthy historical chain of thought colonization: supremacist practices, campaigns and acts of intolerance, slavery, hatred, xenophobia, patriarchy, misogyny, threat and violence. This epistemic colonization also constructs vulnerable groups and bodies: black people, Latinos/as, indigenous people, immigrants, people with HIV/ AIDS, women and members of the LGBTTTI body, among others. Public space is characterized by a wounded and fearful body intimidated by harassment, as well as both verbal and physical violence. Fear of deportation, forced disappearance, torture and homicide has not yet been squelched. We cannot turn a blind eye to the alarming fact that the media are dominated by ultraconservative religious spheres that—directly and indirectly—influence public opinion. These are voices that have always opposed this theopolitical and queer perspective of public space that I am here setting forth. These are forces that oppose imagination and the concrete practice of interpersonal space as a place in which inclusion, mutual respect and non-violent conviviality can occur. Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, the former archbishop primate of Mexico City, has been publically and untiringly critical of this bill (article 16 in the Constitution of Mexico City). He and his followers claim it as an attempt against “natural law,” which only accepts and recognizes heterosexual marriage. Following this same drive against the secular State, a sector of the population headed by the National Family Front (Frente Nacional de la Familia/FNF) burst into public space in September of 2016 in Mexico City in order to demonstrate against this bill, thus reopening a debate that had been presumed to have been come to a resolution earlier.

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In the spring of 2017, Norberto Rivera asked for forgiveness for having offended the homosexual community with his statements, alleging that it had not been his intention to be offensive. Nonetheless, in his public mea culpa, the only option he leaves for those who feel an attraction toward people of their same sex is compulsory chastity, whereas at the same time Rivera Carrera continues to label any position in defense of gender equity and sexual diversity as “ideological.” Some say that, “this change in the primate’s discourse is attributed to the arrival in Mexico of the Italian archbishop Franco Coppola, a man close to the Pope, commissioned to sort out the current distance between the Church and Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration, after the legalizations favoring the LGBTTTI community issued under his mandate.”10 It is important to note that even the Vatican itself sent an official order to the Mexican bishops, in particular to Norberto Rivera, ordering that all signs of hostility be curbed. The Vatican publicly disavowed, “the mobilization against homosexual marriage launched by the most conservative sector of the Mexican hierarchy.”11 Norberto Rivera’s public apology might be sincere, but it might, however, only be the result of official pressure and mandates coming directly from the upper hierarchies of the Vatican. The truth of the matter is that he and his group of both ultra-conservative religious and secular followers publicly disapprove egalitarian marriage, in spite of it being a debate that had supposedly been resolved, even though it is an issue that is civilian rather than religious. Sadly, the impact of Mexican groups opposing the right to egalitarian marriage has brought serious and even fatal consequences to the LGBTTTI community. Mexico has a long and painful history of feminicides. The great number of transfeminicides (assassinations of transgender people) and assassinations of homosexual people are truly alarming. Tragically, Mexico City has become the second city in the world with more hate crimes against sexually diverse people. In Mexico, there are households, schools and institutions in which members of LGBTTTI populations suffer violent, undignified, abusive and even homicidal treatment.12 Unfortunately, religions are part of this problem, and very often aggravate

 http://www.m-x.com.mx/2016-10-31/mea-culpa-de-norberto-rivera-pide-perdon-ahomosexuales-mi-intencion-no-era-ofenderles/ Retrieved on November 2, 2016. 11  http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2016/11/08/mexico/1478623862_ 222153.html?id_externo_rsoc=FB_MX_CM 12  For more information about this theme, see the report in La Jornada newspaper, Saturday May 16, 2015: http://aristeguinoticias.com/1505/mundo/terapias-para-modificar-orientacion-de-gays-son-daninas-ineficaces-y-podrian-ser-tortura-onu/ 10

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things rather than heal this deep wound in the corpus of social space, which is simultaneously private and public. In order to give a queer twist to political theology, it is necessary to carry out an epistemological decolonization of a Eurocentric, male chauvinist, racist, homophobic and colonial theology. In this case, it is imperative for both patriarchy and heteronormativity, which has colonized Christian thinking, to go through epistemic decolonization. For this reason, it is necessary to twist and un-decent political theology from its very entrails, and bring back the God of desire, the inclusive God, the queer God, and release God from the closet.13 This is the only way in which we can recognize, respect and include women and sexually diverse people into our religious communities as well as civic space. Besides, from a queer theory perspective, it is not a question of trying to “tolerate” sexual diversity, but rather of respecting and loving it, in imitation of God’s radically inclusive love. “Love is love” is the slogan proclaimed at the diversity demonstrations. And the sacred texts remind us that God is Love. As the Jesuit dean, David Fernández claims (echoing James Alison), “God not only loves homosexuals, God also delights in them.”14 Let us not forget that the notion of marriage within the Catholic Church has been through a lengthy history of “twists and turns.” Religious marriage is not a static notion. From being a sacrament primarily symbolizing procreation, it became a sacrament based on the love between partners. Theologically speaking, love became an exclusive calling of and for heterosexuals. The notion of homosexuality in the Catholic Church’s doctrinal discourse, however, has not been a static idea, either. The most important—albeit gradual—transformation regarding homosexuality is the shift from a condemnatory idea of homosexuality, understood as an ontological evil or sin, to the assertion that the homosexual person is loved by God. However, more changes, more “twists and turns,” and more transformations in doctrinal theology have to occur. Although Catholic teaching accepts that to “be” homosexual is not a sin in itself, it does ­condemn the homosexual “act” as deviant and against nature. This is obviously a contradiction, since one acts as one is and one is as one acts. It  See Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Queer God. London: Routledge, 2013.  http://www.periodistadigital.com/religion/america/2016/10/27/religion-iglesiamexico-david-fernandez-sj-rector-de-la-universidad-iberoamericana-dios-no-solo-ama-alos-homosexuales-sino-que-le-caen-bien.shtml#.WBJ46OF4CgU.linkedin. See, also, James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay. New York: Crossroad Pub Co, 2001. 13

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would be “anti-natural” to ask someone to act against their own sexual truth, against their affective world and against their own way of experiencing love. Besides, there is no greater evil than lack of transparency and truth toward oneself and others. If love is marriage’s main calling, and the main calling of all human beings is to be happy, then both Catholic and Christian communities must learn to recognize and celebrate those lives incarnating this calling. Love and happiness are not only theological callings, but also theological provocations: since participation in divine and queer love goes beyond and subverts the walls we have raised between each other, to the extent of deporting those that society labels as the “others,” the “indecent ones” condemned to occupy a visible and at times invisible place in the diaspora, the peripheries, due to their ethnicity, gender or sexual identity. There is still much to “un-decent” in the heart of Catholic-Christian theology in order to enable the practice of interpersonal spaces of real peaceful and respectful conviviality; and turn them not only into spaces of tolerance, but also furthermore into spaces of brotherly and sisterly relationships. Just as I have pointed to the need to twist traditional theology, I believe that the Mexican Constitution itself needs to be amended in order for it to recover its original voice. On November 9, 2016, PRI, PAN and Green Party representatives rejected the bill to extend the Constitution in order to make explicit that marriage is not exclusively a civil union with reproductive purposes between a man and a woman. This rejection reveals a homophobic tendency with partisan intentions and an interest in occupying spaces of public domain. By rejecting this bill, some political spheres close the door to recognizing marriage for the LGBTTTI population as a civic right. This rejection, however, does not imply that same sex marriage has been nullified. It does nonetheless reject the explicit constitutional provision that would mandate all the states of the Mexican Republic to recognize egalitarian marriage, without same sex couples having to resort to an injunction in order to civically legalize their union. Of course, it is more than evident that this rejection has been systematically utilized to legitimize a long history of hate discourses and crime against sexually diverse people. This discriminatory attitude perpetuates the treatment of individuals and populations as marginalized and vulnerable minorities, thus fabricating subaltern identities. The majority must not perpetuate the production of minority ghettos harassed and deprived of rights and agency. This implies that the struggle for a queer public space policy in favor of inclusive civic marriage must continually undertake a critical discernment regarding many forms of minoritizing

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non-official life styles and families within the LGBTTTIQ communities. Indeed, there are limitations with, and criticism to, same sex marriage. There is a danger of granting too much power to a position—whether civil or religious—that privileges civic marriage over and against other types of relationships that do not follow “official” or mainstream institutions of “family,” and of romantic, monogamous relationships. Same sex marriage may leave unprotected other minority groups within the LGBTTTIQ population that have no desire to mirror conventional, neoliberal and often conservative social lifestyles. Notions and traditions around family and marriage are an unfinished project. They are a work in progress. Herein I have concentrated on the rights to marriage for Mexican people who have an honest desire to do so, and who had a long history of struggling for their right to marry. Definitely, this initiative must remain forever open to recognize the agency or a lack thereof within a great variety of LGBTTTIQ people that still are unrepresented. While same sex marriage is an important step in Mexico, it must continue developing collaborative strategies that protect most vulnerable minorities living at the peripheries of society: such as people of color, indigenous, and disenfranchised individuals and communities. For sure, a true revolution is not just about equality and inclusion; it is as well about finding creative ways of emerging empowerment from many gender and sexually diverse people around the world.15 We continue to need civic and religious resistance groups in order to construct a theopolitical space (local, national, and transnational) that involves critical and prophetic religious voices that struggle against gender and sexual oppression, against the tearing off of agency. The queering of the public space is not only a deconstruction and dismantling of heteronormative and neocolonial epistemologies; it also follows a re-constructive dynamic knowledge and practice, whereby transformation makes possible the right to love, happiness and mutual care. “¡Sin maricones no hay revoluciones!” (which roughly translates as “Without queering, there is no revolutioneering”) is the slogan that lay and religious voices proclaim in unison at the yearly demonstrations of LGBTTTI pride in Mexico City. Pray that this clamor continues to be heard throughout Mexico and everywhere, trans-forming its public spaces. 15  I am thankful to the main editors of this anthology for suggesting a clarification of this important matter regarding some critical concerns on the initiative of same sex marriage. For a further reading on this issue, I particularly suggest, Ryan Conrad (Ed.), Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion. Oakland: AK Press, 2004.

CHAPTER 12

A Critique of the Coloniality of Theological Knowledge: Rereading Latin American Liberation Theology as Thinking Otherwise Nicolás Panotto

The modern globalized times we live in has encouraged a pedantic sense of progress, leading us to think that everything moves forward in an unstoppable process of change and transformation. Consequently, we easily feel “outdated” in many ways, especially in relation to those things that mobilize social processes. We rush to place ourselves on a privileged platform from which we call “primitive” all the human atrocities of the past, whereas affirming some sort of contemporary “civility.” But reality is far from such a condition. The present often presents itself as a renewed and “politically correct” face of the worst of our history. And this is precisely what happens with the colonial dynamics that have afflicted the modern world in general and Latin America in particular. Colonialism has mutated from its coercive or direct violence mode into surreptitious processes that condition the everyday life and the most microscopic filaments of social relations and imaginaries. It is for this

N. Panotto (*) Instituto de Estudios Internacionales (INTE), Arturo Prat University, Santiago, Chile © The Author(s) 2019 R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_12

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reason that the so-­called decolonial turn, the “Latin American version” of postcolonial theory,1 has devoted much of its reflection and academic practice to analyzing not only the modes of governance or economic policy of the existing imperial and colonial structures, but also the epistemic matrices that support the hermeneutical, symbolic, imaginary, and ritual instances that sustain these scenarios, not only at the individual level but also collectively. But as with all dynamics of power, there are always anti-hegemonic voices that resist the fictitious condition and lack of suture that monopolistic structures and its agents try to impose as naturalized worldviews. These voices not only bring new discourses, performances, and places to the fore, but also take up established frames of knowledge, social practices, and politics and twist their meanings, acting from the fissures that make up the oppressive and alienating contexts of contemporary society. They are otherwise-thoughts that corrode the sameness of imperial monotony. The general field of religion and theology in particular also account for these processes, both internally and externally. That is to say, on the one hand “the religious” acts as both an ideological framework and a matrix of meaning for certain colonial enterprises. On the other hand, it also experiences in its speeches, practices, and ways of institutionality similar tensions to those found in its identity, political, and symbolic environments. Hence, Christian theology responds to this paradoxical mimesis, where its dis1  There is a widespread debate about the difference between decolonial and postcolonial theory. I have already presented an overview of that debate in more detail in other writings. (Panotto 2018) The stand I take is that both theoretical frameworks have particularities in terms of their different “epistemic localities”, but not so much in regard to epistemological foundations or approaches. On top of their distinctive theoretical points of departures— while the decolonial turn works on issues related to (geo)economic policy and political criticism, postcolonial studies focus more on literature and historiography—the epistemic reading of both theoretical frameworks is similar. For example, there is no considerable difference between Homi Bhabha’s concept of spaces in-between (Bhabha 2002) and Walter Mignolo’s border thinking or delinking (Mignolo 2013). Hence, many of the demarcations that are presented as irreconcilable differences, rather offer opportunities for dialogue around close related fields. That’s why I also reject the criticism from certain decolonial turn authors (see Mignolo 2010) that dismiss postcolonial critical tools for otherwise-thinking position because the latter do not locate themselves in a matrix of “colonial difference,” rather responding to or being an extension to the work of French “postmodern” theorists. These assertions must be nuanced, beginning not only with the fact that decolonial turn authors also use European theoretical matrices—such as Marxism and critical Frankfurtian theory, among others—but also because such rivalry limits the possibilities for mutual enrichment between both schools, and for a potential geopolitical dialogue.

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courses and practices have served and attend both at the behest of oppression and also of liberation and decolonization. In this chapter, I introduce some intuitions about how the decolonial-­ turn school of thought has deepened the study of the epistemological dynamics, which frame so many processes of colonial power and also the emergence of otherwise-epistemes that allow to visualize and empower forms of resistance and construction of other-worlds and pluri-verses through the performance and construction of alternative knowledge. These intuitions will inform my analysis of Latin American Liberation Theology (LALT) as a type of decolonial discourse, which deconstructs the colonial senses of monopolized Christianity and makes possible the emergence of other epistemes, whereas visualizing and questioning several colonial elements still present in its own framework, which require questioning with the purpose of enhancing its decolonial capacity.

Toward a Decolonial Epistemology for an Otherwise-Knowledge The decolonial-turn theory’s2 critique of the colonial socio-political dynamics still present in the contemporary globalized world can be summarized through the following triad: coloniality of being, coloniality of power, and coloniality of knowledge (Quijano 2011). Basically, these categorizations suggest that colonial processes are far from being a historical element buried in the past along with the complex processes of independence of Latin American countries. On the contrary, their matrices, ingrained in the relations between central forces and conquered geographies, still persist, although no longer through old coercive dynamics but rather through configurations of meaning on subjectivity, constructions of knowledge, and dynamics of power, which affect not only geopolitical relationships but also the microphysical and daily dispositions of subjects and collectives. These three typifications of coloniality serve to account for the ways in which the dynamics of global power that were born with modernity and post-conquest Western capitalism are still sustained. The coloniality of power refers to the institutional mechanisms of governance as well as to the processes of social classification, that is, the recognition of the logics of domination that prevail in the globalized context. One of the most signifi2

 Teoria del giro colonial in Spanish.

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cant devices is the system and dynamics of racialization (Quijano 2000), although we can also include modern political institutions—such as the place of the State and the idea of nation/nationality as a hegemonic framework of subjectivity (Bhabha 2010)—and bureaucratic political practices derived from those institutions. The coloniality of being involves more concretely the dominant ontological dimensions and the operations of both the codification and legitimization of otherness. Here we could refer to the famous concept of Orientalism by Edward Said (2016), where the construction of the notion of Orient serves as a legitimating mirror of a “Western identity.” The same happens with the demarcations of the concept of “Latin America” in the most important research institutes of latinoamericanismo in central countries (Canclini 2001, 2002). In other words, these identity representations act as designations inscribed in power games between the colonial segmentations (internal and external to the region) that try to homogenize their meaning and the identification operations heterodox to monopolistic figures. Finally, the colonization of knowledge extends over the parameters of construction of knowledge and all its fields of incidence (academy, school, pedagogical processes, the role of intellectuals, and, more specifically, the various processes of epistemological evaluation), where the notions of objectivity and truth go hand in hand with an episteme linked to the supposed suture of the rational, the enlightened, and all their academic devices, which, in turn, serve to legitimize “modern” and “Western” as hegemonic frames of meaning. The identification of the coloniality of knowledge suggests that epistemological dynamics always go hand in hand with the socio-political processes (coloniality of power) and the mechanisms of identity construction (coloniality of being). More concretely, the existence of a set of epistemic understandings that respond to the symbolic, discursive, ideological, and cosmovisional frames of the current geopolitical contexts is evidenced in relation to the promotion of moral, cultural, and political values representative of the postcolonial logics. For all this, an epistemological decolonization is needed to confront new political challenges. Moreover, any process of knowledge construction and dispute over meaning intrinsically entails a locus of socio-political struggle (Claros 2011, p.  6) In this line, for example, it was Subaltern Studies (Freire 2011) that first proposed the search for new codes in academic exercises. The field most developed by this collective was that of a new historiography that puts in parenthesis the colonial historical legacies

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through the tracking of narratives and “little stories” of subalternized groups that were left aside by the “official history” of the empires. It denotes the exercise of rescuing fragments leading to the universalization of monopolistic academic processes that sustain colonial political narratives at the expense of the silencing of everyday dissidences to collapse. In the words of Prakash (2007, p. 366), “there is no other alternative but to inhabit the discipline, dig into the archives and push to the limits the historical knowledge to convert contradictions, ambivalences and gaps into the fundament of their rewriting.” All this implies the recognition of the complexity of the dynamics of power and its necessary deconstruction from the inconsistencies and contingencies inherent to it. It also involves interrogating the surreptitiousness or the microphysics of the powers that are evidenced by alternative and heterogeneous paths of resistance and counter-power that start from constructions of heterodox sense and knowledge, between the fissures of the same “system.” Among the alternative and critical epistemic proposals advanced by decolonial thinkers, the work of Walter Mignolo (2010, 2013) is one of the best known. The Argentinean philosopher sustains that decolonial project is required as a programmatic instance of detachment or delinking of the categories of colonial knowledge. Mignolo (2010) proposes a strategy of delinking: it means using imperial strategies for decolonial purposes. Here we get to the core of his epistemological proposal: the border thinking. This epistemology evokes the pluri-versity and diversity of the dynamics between the spaces of experience and the horizons of expectation subscribed in the colonial/modern space; that is, from subaltern experiences to coexistence with the system. Decolonial critical thinking, connects the pluri-versity of the experiences located within colonial frameworks with the universal project of constant detachment from imperial horizons, thus constructing a proposal that goes beyond the implementation of a model within modern categories (right, center, left), evidencing subversive spaces inscribed in the action of colonized agents between the fissures of the imperial system, which reveal other ways of being, of living together, making politics, understanding the world, performing, constructing knowledge, and inhabiting even the colonial system itself. What Mignolo proposes is that the coloniality of knowledge can be deconstructed, questioned, and “contaminated” from within, enhancing the “colonial difference” as a way to “implode” hegemonic knowledge

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from its own conjunctures, that is, from an internal differentiation3 (Mignolo 2013, p. 112). The pedagogue Catherine Walsh (2005), another representative of the decolonial school, focused on the deconstruction of colonial education in Latin America, goes a step further on this idea, outlining the need not only to implode the prevailing systems from the standpoint of borderly difference, but rather from what she calls a critical frontier positioning (Walsh 2005, pp.  17–22). This means that the difference is not only installed as an internal contamination (i.e., taking and resignifying elements of colonial knowledge) but also as from another place, a completely new epistemology with particular characteristics, that beyond its relevance, extension, or condition questions with its mere presence the hegemony of monopolist knowledge. Inquiring about the concept of “subaltern consciousness,” Gayatri Spivak (2013, pp. 327–348) advanced the strategic use of theory as a category that could concentrate these approaches. Spivak argues that at times the idea of consciousness in subaltern studies is close to a metaphysical representation that has no difference from modern and Western post-­ enlightenment notions, which represent individual and collective identities in an essentialist and sutured way. But in reality, this irruption of the subaltern in a “universal history” told from the logic of powerful groups— which attempt to impose a naturalized and progressive historiography— actually acts as a subject effect that de-sutures the hegemony of the “official” agents and displaces the universal languages, interrupting the linearity of the facts that seek to universalize the stories. This strategic use of the theory assumes two elements. First, the deconstruction of colonial epistemes through an “ironic” and subversive 3  We could bring this idea closer to the concept proposed by Ernesto Laclau of the internal border that fissures the people. This frontier opened by the dynamics of floating signifiers weakens the links between the parts that make it, allowing the movement of the equivalent chains. In his words: “there is only populism if there is a set of political-discursive practices that build a popular subject, and the precondition for the emergence of such subject is, as we have seen, the construction of an internal border that divides the social space in two fields. But the logic of that division is established, as we know, by the creation of an equivalent chain between a series of social demands, in which the equivalency moment prevails over the differential nature of the demands. Finally, the equivalent chain cannot be the result of a purely fortuitous coincidence but must be consolidated through the emergence of an element that gives coherence to the chain by meaning it as a whole. This element is what we have called empty signifier” (Laclau 2005, p. 64).

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approach of its fundamental categories.4 Second, the emergence of the subaltern implies a logic of location that perceives such epistemological dynamics as the recognition and empowerment of the pluralization of modes of knowledge construction. Expanding on this second element, it is worth considering that localization processes are directly related to the place of the subject in the decolonial turn (Panotto 2012b) not only as an analytical category referring to the social or collective individual but mainly as a representation of the emergence of dislocations and movements within social groups, which destabilize monopolistic epistemic places (Lazzarati 2007). This implies the understanding of the social sciences “from the standpoint of the processes of subjectivation and the place of ‘creative difference.’” That in turn means the recognition of instances of tension, resistance, and interaction of “worlds.” (Zuleta et  al. 2007, pp. 15–20). We can summarize what has been said up to this point by affirming that an epistemology based on an otherwise-thinking involves three central aspects. First, that knowledge is an always-open inquiry that emerges as a passing representativeness of the undecidability that intersects it. Therefore, theory never constitutes a normative set of universalizable explanations and determinations. It is rather a transient intuition about reality and an exploration that is never reducible to a simple rational insight, being instead motivated by social concerns, ideological perspectives, and political and cultural frameworks. Second, it is an epistemology that breaks the dichotomy between theory and praxis (Pitts 2019). This colonial distinction has served various purposes: from legitimizing classifications of social stratification (academia vs. politics, the West as a producer of knowledge vs. the Third World as executor), to the division between object/subject, which has substantiated the reification of reality and the neutralizing abstraction of scientific statements. An epistemology from an otherwise-thinking perspective understands praxis as the “employment horizon of theory” (Claros 2011, p. 107), where history and constructions of meaning are not two separate dimensions that belong ontologically to distinguishable fields (such as praxis/politics and theory/academia) but instead instances that cannot be 4  Here we follow the concept of “deconstruction” suggested by Gayatri Spivak (2013, p. 334): “This is the greatest virtue of deconstruction: to question the authority of the subject that investigates without paralyzing them, persistently transforming the conditions of impossibility into possibility.”

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understood without one another. Theory is a set of statements that in turn “presses” the established representation of praxis. Likewise, the dynamics of the latter questions any cognitive set.5 Finally, this epistemology does not intend to be the reflection of an established universe where it is necessary to be “discovered” with its characteristics and processes, already defined by an immovable ontological status (Smith 2015). Rather, theories are the sample of a plurality of universes. Moreover, as we have stated, epistemological dynamics themselves are constructions of universes-otherwise, since their exercise implies not only analysis and categorization but also articulation, creation, and subversion (Escobar 2003; Zuleta 2007).

Liberation Theology as Thinking Otherwise As Gustavo Gutiérrez has stated, one of the main contributions of LALT is its commitment to a new method; a way of doing theology that recognizes its historical contingency and commitment, sinking into it with the aim of not only investigating the contextual and transitory fibers that are woven into any biblical and theological matrix, but do it mainly from a fervent evangelical call to transform it. Its great epistemological move is to locate the oppressed subject, the poor, as the central agent of theological work and biblical interpretation, that is, as an hermeneutical epicenter that illuminates the revelation processes that take place in history as their main scenario. LALT represents an epistemology that is not only present in denounces of suspicion, but one that focuses on deepening the various levels of its method. Hence, the assumption of history as a hermeneutic field and subjects as the axial epicenter of the theological work led to a careful study of the necessary theoretical mediations for [theological] analysis. This approach undoubtedly has provoked many discussions, controversies, and tensions not only within the church or in broader theological circles, but also among the followers of LALT (Maldonado-Torres 2005).

5  “The critical use of theory is not interested in the specific contents of theories, but in their specification in relation to the possibilities of action in the present, hence theory’s critical use denies the long-term establishment of any specific theoretical content. The intention of this approach is the revitalization of the subject as both a conscious insubordination in the given and a frontal struggle against the different forms of fetishization” (Claros 2011, p. 108).

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One can say that LALT advances a new epistemological framework, which has undoubtedly left a widespread mark in contemporary theological work. In other words, it is precisely the development of a clear epistemology—with diverse hermeneutical objects and processes, theoretical mediations, socio-anthropological readings, and understandings of knowledge and its social impact—which has allowed LALT to establish itself as a framework that has lasted over time, not only as a particular type of discourse that is still relevant, but rather as a provocative hermeneutic proposal of a variety of discourses, practices, senses, biblical-theological worldviews, and subjective approaches. As Lisa Isherwood and Harris (2013, p. 13) rightly states, “theology has never been good at reading itself.” In this direction, we believe that the LALT—at least in its first generations and in most traditional discourses, which still remain valid—has gone through internal tensions that perhaps have not yet been adequately resolved or addressed, what prevents its proposal from being radicalized based on its constitutive possibilities. That is why I submit that LALT needs to deepen the hermeneutical mediations of its epistemology in order to apply them to its own methodology and discourses both as an exercise of self-criticism and as a radicalization of its schemes. In other words, LALT does not only need to aim at new contents, but rather to enhance a decolonial hermeneutical capacity inherent in its interpretative framework as otherwise-knowledge. Moreover, we believe that a rereading of the LALT method from a decolonial epistemological paradigm can be a fruitful path in this necessary redefinition (Rivera-Pagán). More specifically, a decolonial perspective leads us to ask analytical questions, such as: who are the subjects present in Latin American theological enterprise who pluralize and diversify the original proposal of the LALT? In which way does LALT keep open the differentiating undecidability of history, enabling not only other locations of alterity but also instances of epistemic redefinition toward itself? Hermeneutics in the LALT Within all the elements that are part of the LALT epistemology, we could mention three central axes: the conception of the liberating God, the poor as a theological subject, and history as a setting for praxis. These three axes represent both the objects (God-Subject-History) and the keys for the hermeneutical processes within the LALT method (that is, the dynamic involving these three objects represents the starting point within the

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methodology in LALT and each of its processes of interpretation and construction of meaning). The relationship between these three objects—God, Subject(s), and History—is a central element to define the hermeneutic proposal of LALT, in both dogmatic and biblical terms. First, because it is a hermeneutics that sees history as a scenario where the divine (constructed, described, and interpreted as Being) is revealed. Such exercise implies the locating and analyzing of processes, tensions, dynamics, frames of meaning, discourses, institutional practices—present in both the biblical text and the field of the interpreting subject—among other elements, to explain the notions of the divine and divine economy. Second, because it is an epistemology whose locus is placed in the context and the constitutive and identity characterizations of a subject who is not only a receiver but also an active agent (praxis). Last but not least, because it is an epistemology that starts from a questioning and deconstruction of the divine ontology itself, which assumes, interpellates, stresses, and challenges the processes of such history, all understood as epicenters of revelation. Critics, Disenchantments, and Reductionisms The launching of an epistemological foundation with the structure proposed by LALT allowed this paradigm to prevail as a method extended over time, which had the capacity to respond to diverse contexts and circumstances, and which was established as the starting point of a set of particular biblical-theological expressions. But it should also be recognized that this diversity of voices did not come only from the contents developed by LALT, but rather by the movement that its hermeneutical axes activated from the location of distinct subjects and worldviews about history and the divine. In this sense, we can say that the epistemological elements of the LALT method questioned, challenged, and surpassed many of its own particular proposals and discourses, making room to expressions that, moving beyond their identification with the roots of LALT, enabled other identifications, which ended up “imploding” from within its discursive matrix. Throughout the history of LALT we find several voices that have arisen from its own midst, which have expressed strong questions about some of its theological contents, or about reductionisms respecting the hermeneutical elements of the LALT method. Many of these critics have been ­oriented on the basis of one of the three axes that we have previously developed.

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For example, Ivone Gebara (2000, pp. 50–69) addresses the essentialist, anthropocentric, and androcentric character that still maintains the idea of God Liberator in LALT, which in many ways responds to a colonial worldview of the divine. Although the Brazilian theologian values the liberationist paradigm and its contribution to the redefinition of the divine ontos, she suggests that the understanding of God as creator, Lord, and controller of History alludes to a sutured image of the divine that keeps it within imprisoning cosmovisions with regard to other ways of viewing history and the possibility of inclusion of new axiological subjects that would contribute to the possible development of new theological discourses based on other historical experiences. It represents the “obvious God”, as Hugo Assmann affirms (2000, p. 115). A second aspect has to do with the notion of the subject, especially in relation to the implications of the option for the poor. One of the major observations in this field has been developed by Marcella Althaus-Reid, who, in all her works, indicates that the notion of the poor within LALT expresses a rigid worldview about the subjects—more precisely, among poor men and poor women—without taking into account a hermeneutic of suspicion in terms of sexuality (Althaus-Reid 2005, pp. 29–34), with all the implications that it has to identify other instances of oppression as well as liberation strategies from the experience of the oppressed. Hugo Assmann (2004) discusses not only the reductionism around the understanding of the poor as a unique and quasi-metaphysical subject of LALT but also other proposals—such as those of Franz Hinkelammert (1998) and Jung Mo Sung (2005)—that have complexified this notion, but still maintain some structuralist intuitions of identity (and identification processes). In short, they do not break with an abstract, patriarchal, and economistic idea of the subject-poor, which does not consider the subject’s body, everyday life, sexuality, and bonding networks. Finally, there are also debates regarding the LALT method, which focus on the types of theoretical mediations used. We already know that the use of Marxism is one of the aspects that have provoked more discussion, although perhaps we could say that it does not represent the underlying problem (Segundo 1983, p. 272ss). More importantly, the LALT method has fallen under certain epistemological essentialisms (such as a less complexized definition of the subject, a mechanistic understanding of history and a theology that has not deeply examined some central dogmatic themes), which led to proposed reductionist categories along with historial cosmovisions and socio-political dynamics that fail to analytically

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address with the necessary depth the turbulent and gray abysses of the socio-political context approached. This cloistering is not so much due to the use of Marxism itself but rather to the lack of questioning about the necessary deconstruction of elementary notions, and a failure to complexify the analytical mediations emerging from studies on heterogeneity, corporality, sexuality, and the aesthetic dimension of social constructions. Despite these elements, and in line with what has been stated previously, I believe that there are elements within LALT itself that can act as devices to respond to and rethink several of these critical aspects from a decolonial perspective. I will concentrate on two of those aspects: the sense of divine otherness and its historical and subjective incidence, and a theopoetics contribution from a postcolonial perspective. Otherness, History, and Subjectivity(s) One of the topics related to this resignification of the epistemological processes in LALT is the meaning of otherness and transcendence as ontological categories. The hermeneutic ontology as a framework of theological work implies taking otherness, difference, and plurality as starting points of method (González 1993). On this matter, we can recall Ignacio Ellacuría’s work on the philosophy of history and salvation. For Ellacuría, the otherness of the divine is not an extra-historical element. Instead, it is intra-historical. Thus, it produces a two-way movement: (1) history is defined from the perspective of the ontological opening that produces the revelation of God, and (2) the divine is represented from the instance of an immanent-transcendent tension in history itself.6 The notions of otherness and transcendence deepen and radicalize LT presuppositions, on the basis of the three hermeneutical objects mentioned earlier. First, it redefines the ontology of the divine and its revelation, framing it rather within the tensions that occur in history, from the processes of encounter and absence, and not in the extremes of a supranatural transcendence or in a cloistering immanence. In decolonial terms, 6  For this reason, Ellaquiría (1993, pp. 328–329) emphasizes […] in seeing transcendence as something that transcends in and not as something that transcends from, as something that physically drives to more but not taking out of; as something that throws, but at the same time retains […] God can be separated from history, but history cannot be separated from God […] The transcendence of which we speak is presented as historical and history is presented in turn as transcendent.

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the divine manifests itself as a revelation that raises differences, that acts as de-constructor of sedimented senses of power and keeps open the gap of the unutterable that challenges the epistemic monopolies of the coloniality of being, power, and knowledge. Second, otherness inscribes the question of the subject not only within a kind of depository framework or as an absolute agent, but as an epicenter of differentiation. That is, it radicalizes the spaces of enunciation and localization through a double decolonial hermeneutics that evidences the diversity of subjectivity processes, and, from there, questions the hegemonic theological meanings of monopolistic religious agents by pluralizing alternative constructions of meaning (e.g., women, indigenous peoples, Afro-American communities, LGTBIQ movements, etc.). Finally, trans-immanence makes history a field that promotes a plurality of practices and not a cloistered framework of worldviews. Here we can locate the important differentiation that Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2005, p.  57) points out by stating that LT should think “not only in terms of orthodoxy and orthopraxis but in terms of heterodoxy and heteropraxis.” Theopoetics and Postcolonial Critic When I speak of the limitations of LT—or, in other words, the need to radicalize several elements of its method—I refer to the requirement to have greater sensitivity about the complexities, daily lives, passions, and feelings that are at stake when it comes to discerning the action of God, the processes of history, and the ways in which subjects are constituted and act. Therefore, aesthetics, art, and the body should be considered as elementary frameworks of a decolonial epistemic exercise that visibilize otherwise-­knowledge, and with them the diversification of colonial differences that expose the plurality of subjects that challenge (and implode) the false homogeneity of the colonial worldview. That is why there is a need to highlight theopoetic (the poetic dimension of theology) as a way to enable hermeneutics from instances that allow us to take into account the complicated twists and turns of life, which go far beyond and leaving aside the reductionism of rationalist and structuralist approaches that have reigned in LALT under a certain colonial imprint that is still persistent in Western Christian matrices, that homogenizes readings about God, history, and subjects. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the radical and critical dimension—in biblical-­

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theological and socio-political perspectives—that a “sensitive approach” to poetics, body, and aesthetics poses to discourses and practices, through which the dichotomy between theory and theological praxis is deconstructed. Theopoetics could be linked to a foundational conception within LALT, namely, the idea of praxis as a pretheological element (Gutiérrez 1986, pp. 80–84; Boff 1980, pp. 35–64). Beyond the inquiries that might argue for certain reductionism present in this statement in the sense that no praxis happens as tabula rasa in theological terms, the idea of experience as a “prior” element to the theological construction implies considering all the aesthetic and bodily elements that come into play as constitutive aspects of the subject. The notion of praxis in LALT is often presented in an abstract way, starting from homogeneous definitions and from a discourse of “political reason” that appeals to a sutured militant conscience on the part of the subjects, which risks leaving aside the ambivalences, contradictions, passions, affections, bodily relationships, and aesthetic experiences that should be considered when analyzing the place of people and social dynamics within the hermeneutical processes. In this sense, a resignification of the notion of “theology as a critical reading of praxis” (Gutiérrez 1986, pp. 72–86) in LALT would allow us to develop the critique of the colonial distinction between theory and practice, and on the other hand act as an operative matrix that empowers performances, practices, aesthetics displays, rituals, and heterodox political discourses, which predominate in other forms of knowledge construction (for example, in social movements, groups of alternative militancy, spaces of artistic expression, and ecclesial and alternative spirituality communities, among several others) as ways of subverting monopolistic matrices. We do not only need to deconstruct the ways of understanding the experiences of the subjects but also the framework of their actions. Hence the warning of Eugenio Trías (1994) about the need to get free from technoscience in order to achieve a radical critique of the metaphysical foundations that infect our epistemologies. Therefore, says the Spanish philosopher, the way out is to put more emphasis on poiesis, that is, on an artistic and aesthetic definition of the τέχνη. This does not require a complete discarding of the metaphysical dimension as an ontological framework but locating it in the interstice, that is, in its inherent movement between the rational and the irrational, the given and the coming. In other words, in its intrinsic place within the border of the colonial senses. We need to recover the “limiting dimension” of logos, where word, meaning,

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and praxis are located as creative instances that go beyond categorical conceptualizations of modernity. As I have mentioned, this poetic opening of sense inscribes in itself a socio-political dimension by challenging and disturbing the foundations of established colonial representations. In this sense, “the challenge that interpellates theology is the place that gives the transcendental beauty as an experience of openness and transcendence” (Mattera 2010, p.  250). The aesthetic, corporal, and artistic dimension of the theological does not imply closing its task, once again, to certain frontiers or dissections that depart from other experiences intrinsic to hermeneutics, such as the socio-political, cultural, economic, scientific, and so on. Rather, it highlights those elements inherent to the historical existence and the constitution of the subjects, which are placed into play through the gestures of the body, the imagination, the innumerable modes of relationship with the cosmos and humanity, and which symbolize the fundamental elements of any hermeneutical process, although many rationalist and scientistic theories want to place it in a secondary or null place. To speak of theopoetics is to place emphasis on the transcendence and otherness of the divine from the perspective of the empowerment of the subjects in a liberating key. This infers including and recognizing the diverse ways in which they participate, intuit, and describe the divine Mystery both as a constant movement of revelation and historical praxis (Rivera 2007). Theopoetics means transcending the “obvious” of colonial constructions. Therefore, it is supra theological (LoPresti 2013, pp. 81–82). This is why many contemporary theologians (Schneider 2008, pp. 107–126; McFague 1994, pp. 63–107) warn that theological ontology cannot be separated from poetry and the mythological, or even from the ludic (Alves 1976, 1982; Geraldina CÉSPEDES 2014; Panotto 2016, pp. 79–98). As Catherine Keller (2003, p. xviii) states, “if theological discourse wants to live, it must speak among the interstices of the historical densities of the text and their creative hopes.” Theopoetics also includes a critical dimension in a decolonial key. This scheme warns us about recognizing the tensions that develop within the colonial abyss (Yountae 2016), where the uncontrollable and unknown depths of human and cosmic daily life inscribed in colonial tensions lead to the emergence of new worlds, new senses, and new epistemologies. It implies the understanding that where (colonial) differences emanate, (new) beginnings arise. For this reason, theopoetics is theomatic (Keller 2003, pp. 3–24) and postcolonial: the cosmic dynamic is understood as a gestation from and within chaos, and from the depths of the mystery of

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history, from which subjects and disruptive cosmovisions arise as divine forces, from the uncontrollable intersubjective experience (Panotto 2016). To summarize, a theopoetic dimension leads us to emphasize that the construction of new sensitivities around the definition of the divine economy, the place of the subjects and the historical heteropraxis, come hand in hand with the inclusion of elements linked with other epistemological frameworks, where corporal, aesthetics, artistic, and poetic dimensions come into play. The consideration of these elements allows us to demonstrate other ways of conceiving social relations, movements of the subjects, and alternative subaltern epistemes to the official theological discourses. In other words, it makes it possible to show alternative ways to elaborate theological discourses, not by the means of “adorning” religious discourse in a naïve fashion (as postmodern, postcolonial, and poststructuralist theologies are usually labeled), but as a way of demonstrating the constructions of meaning that are gestated in contexts of ambivalence, complexity, and originality. This multiplicity of theological discourses empower and revalue daily practices of the subjects as instances of creative questioning and otherwise-thoughts facing the hegemonic senses that underlie the Western and modern logics of colonial oppression.

Conclusions: Toward an Epistemological Critique of LT in a Decolonial Key The discussion above presents LALT as a theological otherwise-thought, or more specifically, as a decolonial epistemology that emerges as a delinking from Western Christian theology, which displaces the frontiers of its identification, giving rise to a pluralization of voices that echo this particular religious identity, whereas exceeding it. I have offered some elements that highlight the need for LALT to carry out an internal critique of its own methodological axes. I have argued more specifically that the importance of its methodology lies in the opening of other epistemic frameworks emanating from it (feminist, Black, Hispanic, Queer, etc.), in the inclusion of alternative worldviews, and in a deep deconstruction of the notion of God from the locus of divine otherness that makes visible the historical fissures inscribed within its diversity. In the words of Lisa Isherwood and Harris (2013, p.  14), “the role of theologians is not to correct the rupture that the divine incarnation created; rather, our role is to continue that discontinuity”.

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LALT’s epistemological value emanates from its capacity to disturb the colonial foundational matrices that operate within dominant Christian worldviews, visibilizing and empowering otherwise-subjects and epistemes. It does not assume one concept of history, but an unfolding of theology from the infinity of complex historical scenarios in the undecidability inscribed in colonial difference. It does not enthrone a single category of subject but includes every agent in a situation of oppression as a liberating fracture of the colonial status quo, from the visibility of epistemes-­others, performances-others, discourses-others, that undermine the imperial stability. It does not start from an absolute liberating Entity, but from a position that liberates that same notion of the divine toward a Mystery that breaks through established representations, tightening the borders of hegemonic meaning and promoting decolonial senses from the notions of difference and diversity. This hermeneutical power is what LALT needs to assume from a radicalization of its epistemological axes, in order to pluralize discourses, subjects, and theologies. Finally, it is also necessary to emphasize a radical new strategic use of theological knowledge. Theological institutions are experiencing an important crisis on the global level. But that crisis seems even more patent in Latin America. We can affirm that the debacle of the ecumenical theological education resides precisely in its inability to put aside its colonial formulations, responding to modern, western, rationalist, and systematic epistemes that ignore the plurality of existing theological agents (which exceed church-institution but that account for the plurality of ecclesial identifications in Christianity) as well as other possible curricular and investigative practices that reflect this scenario (Panotto and Preiswerk 2017) The solution for Latin American (and global) theological education resides in taking seriously a process of institutional, epistemic, and pedagogical decolonization that responds to the emerging paradigm that is sustained in the sociology of emergencies (De Sousa Santos 2009, 2010, 2012) of the countless discourses and ways of being-in-the-world.

Bibliography Althaus-Reid, Marcella (2005) “From Liberation Theology to Indecent Theology. The Trouble of Normality in Theology”. In: Petrella, Ivan, ed., Latin American Liberation Theology. The Next Generation, Maryknoll: Orbis Book, pp. 20–38 Alves, Rubem (1976) Hijos del Mañana. Salamanca: Sígueme ——— (1982) la teología como Juego. Buenos Aires: la Aurora

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Assmann, Hugo (2000) “Por una Teología Humanamente Saludable. Fragmentos de Memoria Personal”. En: Susin, Luis. El mar se abrió. Treinta años de teología en América latina. Santander: Sal Terrae, pp. 108–122 ——— (2004) “Apuntes Sobre el Tema del Sujeto”. In: Duque, José, org., Perfiles Teológicos Para un Nuevo Milenio. San José: DEI, pp. 116–146 Bhabha, Homi K. (2002) El lugar de la Cultura. Buenos Aires: Manantial ——— (2010) comp., Nación y Narración: Entre la Ilusión de una Identidad y las Diferencias Culturales. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Boff, Clodovis (1980) Teología de lo Político. Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme Canclini, Néstor (2001) Culturas Híbridas. Buenos Aires: Paidós ——— (2002) latinoamericanos Buscando Lugar en Este Siglo. Buenos Aires: Paidós Castro Gomez, Santiago (2003) “latin American Philosophy as Critical Ontology of the Present: Themes and Motifs for a ‘Critique of latin American Reason’”. In: Eduardo Mendieta, ed. Latin American Philosophy. Currents, Issues, Debates. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 68–79 ——— (2007) “Deconolizar la Universidad: la Hybris del Punto Cero y el Dialogo de Saberes” en Castro-Gómez, Santiago y Grosfoguel, Ramón. El Giro Decolonial. Reflexiones para una Verdad Epistemica más Allá del Capitalismo Global. Bogotá: Siglo del hombre Editores, pp. 79–91 ——— (2011) “Ciencias Sociales, Violencia Epistémica y el Problema de la ‘Invención del Otro’” en Edgardo Lander, la Colonialidad del Saber. Buenos Aires: CICCUS/ClaCSO, pp. 163–179 Céspedes, G. (2014) “Nuevos hilos para un nuevo tejido. A 50 años del Vaticano II y 40 años de la Teología Latinoamericana y Caribeña” En: BIGHENTI, A. y HERMANO, R., Orgs. La teología de la Liberación en Prospectiva. Congreso Continental de Teología. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Católica Silva Enrique, pp. 37–70 Claros, Luis (2011) Colonialidad y Violencias Cognitivas. Ensayos Políticos-­ Epistemológicos. la Paz: Muela del Diablo Editores De Sousa Santos, Boaventura (2009) Una Epistemología del Sur. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI ——— (2010) Para Descolonizar Occidente. Más Allá del Pensamiento Abismal. Buenos Aires: Prometeo libros/ClaCSO ——— (2012) De la Mano de Alicia. Lo Social y lo Político en la Posmodernidad. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores Deleuze, Giles (2002) Diferencia y Repetición. Madrid: Editora Nacional Dussel, Enrique. (this volume) “Epistemological Decolonization of Theology” Ellaquiría, Ignacio (1993) “Historicidad de la Salvación Cristiana” en Ellaquiría, Ignacio y Sobrino, Jon, comps., Mysterium Liberationis, Tomo I, San Salvador: UCA Editores, pp. 328–329 ——— (2007) Filosofía de la Realidad Histórica. San Salvador: UCA Editores Escobar, Arturo (2003) “Mundos y Conocimientos de otro modo” En Tabula Rasa. Bogotá - Colombia, No. 1: 51–86

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Freire, Raúl Rodríguez (2011) la (Re)vuelta de los Estudios Subalternos. Una Cartografía a (Des)tiempo. Chile: Ocho Libros Gebara, Ivone (2000) Intuiciones Ecofeministas. Ensayo para Repensar el Conocimiento y la Religión. Madrid: Trotta González, Antonio (1993) “El Significado Filosófico de la Teología de la Liberación”. In: Comblin, José, González Faus, José; Sobrino, Jon. Cambio Social y Pensamiento Cristiano en América latina. Madrid: Trotta, pp. 145–160 Gutiérrez, Gustavo (1986) Teología de la Liberación. Perspectivas. Lima: CEP ——— (2002) ¿Dónde dormirán los pobres? Lima: CEP Hinkelammert, Franz (1998) El Grito del Sujeto. San José: DEI Isherwood, Lisa y Harris, David (2013) Radical Otherness. Sociological and Theological Approaches. Durham: ACRUMEN Keller, Catherine (2003) Face of the Deep. A Theology of Becoming. London and New York: Routledge Laclau, Ernesto (2005) la Razón Populista. Buenos Aires: FCE Lander, Edgardo (2011) “Ciencias Sociales: Saberes Coloniales y Eurocéntricos”. In: la Colonialidad del Saber. Buenos Aires: CICCUS/ClaCSO, pp. 15–44 Lazzarato, Maurizio (2007) “El acontecimiento y la política. La filosofía de la diferencia y las ciencias sociales” en Zuleta, Mónica; Cubides, Humberto; Escobar, Manuel Roberto, eds. ¿Uno solo o varios mundos? Diferencia, subjetividad y conocimientos en las ciencias sociales contemporáneas. Bogotá: Universidad Central, pp. 23–36 Lopresti, Matthew (2013) “Poiesis, Fides, et Ratio in the Absence of Relativism” In: Faber, Roland y Fackenthar, Jeremy, eds., Theopoetic Folds. Philosophizing Multifariousness. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 81–96 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson (2005) “Liberation Theology and the Search for a Lost Paradigm. From Radical Orthodoxy to Radical Diversality” In: Petrella, Ivan, ed., latin American Liberation Theology. The Next Generation, Maryknoll: Orbis Book, pp. 39–61 Mattera, María Constanza (2010) “la Belleza de un Diálogo Posible” En: De Polumbo, Cecilia and Quelas, Juan. Belleza que Hiere. Reflexiones sobre Literatura, Estética y Teología. Buenos Aires: Agape Libros, pp. 243–287 McFague, Sallie (1994) Modelos de Dios. Teología para una era ecológica y nuclear. Santander: Sal Terrae Mignolo, Walter (2010) Desobediencia Epistémica. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Signo ——— (2013) Historias Locales/Diseños globales. Madrid: Akal Panotto, Nicolás (2012a) Hacia una Teología del Sujeto Político. San José: UNA ——— (2012b) “Sujetos Políticos y Espacios Poscoloniales. Un Análisis del Movimiento de la ‘Juventud K’”. In: Newsletter Facultad de Ciencias Sociales; pp. 1–10 ——— (2015) “Heterotopías, Nomadismos e Identidades Populares Una Relectura del Concepto de Pueblo desde el Relato del Éxodo en las Teologías de la Liberación” In: Horizontes Decoloniales, Volumen 1, No. 1, pp. 164–195.

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——— (2016a) De Juegos que Hablan de Dios. Hacia una Teología desde la Niñez latinoamericana. Quito: SBU ——— (2016b) Religión, Política y Poscolonialidad en América latina. Hacia una Teología Posfundacional de lo Público. Buenos Aires: Miño&Davila ——— (2018) “Descolonizar el Saber: El Pensamiento-Otro como Estrategia Epistémica Socio-Política” In: Pensar Distinto, N° 1 En prensa Panotto, Nicolás y Preiswerk, Matthias (2017) Otra Educación Teológica es Posible. Nuevos Sujetos y Campos. Buenos Aires: SPT Pitts, Andrea J. (2019) “Decolonial Praxis and Epistemic Justice” In: Kidd, Ian James; Medina, José; Pohlhaus, Jr., Gaile, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Routledge, pp. 149–157 Prakash, Gyan (2007) “Los estudios de la subalternidad como crítica post-colonial” en Debates Post Coloniales: una introducción a los estudios de la subalternidad. Bogota: SEPHIS Quijano, Aníbal (2000) “Colonialidad del Poder y Clasificación Social” en Journal of World-Systems Research, New York, pp. 342–386 ——— (2011) “Colonialidad del Poder, Eurocentrismo y América latina” en Edgardo Lander. la Colonialidad del Saber. Buenos Aires: CICCUS/ClaCSO, pp. 219–264 Richard, Nelly (1998) “Intersectando latinoamérica con el latinoamericanismo: Discurso Académico y Crítica Colonial” en Santiago Castro-Gómez y Eduardo Mendieta, eds. Teorías sin Disciplina. latinoamericanismo, Poscolonialidad y Globalización en Debate. México: Miguel Ángel Porrúa, pp. 185–218 Rivera, Mayra (2007) The Touch of Transcendence. A Postcolonial Theology of God. Lousiville-London: Westminster John Knox Press Rivera-Pagán, Luis N. (this volume) “Towards a Decolonial Theology: Perspectives from the Caribbean” Said, Edward (2016) Orientalismo. Buenos Aires: Debate Segundo, Juan Luis (1983) Teología Abierta, Tomo III, Barcelona: Ediciones Cristiandad Schneider, lauder (2008) Beyond Monotheism. A Theology of Multiplicity. London and New York: Routledge Smith, Linda Tuhiwai (2015) A descolonizar las metodologías. Investigación y pueblos indígenas. Santiago: LOM. Spivak, Gayatri (2013) En Otras Palabras, en Otros Mundos. Ensayos sobre Política Cultural. Buenos Aires: Paidós Sung, Jung Mo (2005) Sujeto y Sociedades Complejas. San José: DEI Trías, Eugenio (1994) “la Superación de la Metafísica y el Pensamiento del Límite”. In: Vattimo, Gianni, comp. la Secularización de la Filosofía. Hermenéutica y Posmodernidad, Buenos Aires: Gedisa Ediciones, pp. 283–296 Vigil, José María (1991) la Opción por los Oobres. Santander: Sal Terrae

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Yountae, An (2016) The Decolonial Abyss. Mysticism and Cosmopolitics from the Ruins. New York: Fordham University Press Walsh, Catherine, ed. (2005) Pensamiento Crítico y Matriz (De)colonial. Reflexiones latinoamericanas. Quito: Abya-Yala Zuleta, Mónica (2007) “Los vínculos entre el conocimiento y la experiencia” en Zuleta, Mónica; Cubides, Humberto; Escobar, Manuel Roberto, eds. ¿Uno solo o varios mundos? Diferencia, subjetividad y conocimientos en las ciencias sociales contemporáneas. Bogotá: Universidad Central, pp. 37–52 Zuleta, Mónica; Cubides, Humberto; Escobar, Manuel Roberto (2007) “Prólogo” en Zuleta, Mónica; Cubides, Humberto; Escobar, Manuel Roberto, eds. ¿Uno Solo o Varios Mundos? Diferencia, Subjetividad y Conocimientos en las Ciencias Sociales Contemporáneas. Bogotá: Universidad Central, pp. 11–20

PART IV

Decolonial Ecclesiologies

CHAPTER 13

Cuando el pobre crea en el pobre: Decolonial Epistemology in the Ecclesial Base Communities of El Salvador Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo

In the small Christian communities of El Salvador’s iglesia popular, members young and old often join together in singing the songs of the twentieth-­century nueva trova movement, historical Salvadoran folk music, new songs written by the communities themselves, and the music of the renowned Central American popular masses: the Misa Popular Nicaragüense, the Misa Campesina Nicaragüense, the Misa Popular Salvadoreña, and the more recently composed Misa Mesoamericana.1  See J.M.  Vigil and A.  Torrellas, Misas Centroamericanas: Transcripción y Comentario Teológico (Managua, Nicaragua: CAV-CEBES, 1988). Accessed on October 10, 2018, at https://cfones.jesuitas.cl/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/misascentroamericanas.pdf. In a special issue of Toronto Journal of Theology dedicated to decolonial theology, Becca Whitla argues that singing can be a way of embodying decoloniality. See Becca Whitla, “Singing as Un Saber del Sur, or Another Way of Knowing,” in Toronto Journal of Theology 33/2 (Fall 2017), 289–294. 1

E. O’Donnell Gandolfo (*) Wake Forest University School of Divinity, Winston-Salem, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_13

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These songs reverberate through rural chapels, urban community centers, family homes, and town plazas during almost every gathering that the base communities organize, from weekly Celebrations of the Word and/or Eucharist to bible studies, youth group meetings, popular education sessions, political protests, and Salvadoran martyrs’ anniversary celebrations. One of the songs that is often sung in full voice and with great pride during these gatherings is the canto de despedida of the Salvadoran Popular Mass, composed by Guillermo Cuellar and entitled “Cuando el pobre crea en el pobre” [“When the poor believe in the poor”].2 The chorus of this song proclaims: Cuando el pobre crea en el pobre ya podemos cantar libertad. Cuando el pobre crea en el pobre construiremos la fraternidad.

When the poor believe in the poor Then we can sing of freedom, When the poor believe in the poor We will construct brother/sisterhood.

These lyrics point to a decolonizing epistemology at work in the base communities’ insistence that the historically forgotten ones, the marginalized of the church and society, are the ones who hold the key to their epistemological and practical liberation. The song’s final verse fleshes out this decolonizing conviction in explicitly Christian terms: Cuando el pobre busca al pobre y nace la organización es que empieza nuestra liberación. Cuando el pobre anuncia al pobre la esperanza que Él nos dio, es que el Reino entre nosotros nació.

When the poor seek out the poor, And organization is born, That’s the beginning of our liberation. When the poor proclaim to the poor The hope that God gave us, That’s the reign of God born among us.

Here the in-breaking of the Reign of God, arguably a decolonial historical reality, depends on the knowledge that emerges from the process of the poor entering into solidarity with the poor and sharing the hope born of God’s presence in their shared struggles for survival and liberation.

2  To listen to the version of this song as it was recorded by the Salvadoran folkgroup, Yolocamba Ita, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha3bxZ1NofE. For a recording that sounds closer to the way it is sung in the base communities, visit https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=euFVcTlsbM4. Both accessed October 10, 2018.

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This chapter offers an analysis of the comunidades eclesiales de base (CEBs), or ecclesial base communities, of El Salvador as sites of decolonial epistemology and praxis. In the CEBs of El Salvador, the poor have been engaged in the evolving and ongoing process of “believing in the poor”3— in themselves and their communities—for the past 50 years. I will argue that this has been a process of decolonial recovery of human dignity and capacity for critical thought, as well as a discovery of the Christian vocation to engage in decolonial praxis for the transformation of an unjust world. This process has been facilitated by a pastoral method and praxis of prophetic memory, in which the CEBs are the primary producers of knowledge and subjects of history. I will proceed in four parts. First, I will offer some historical and theological background on the Latin American base communities in general and the Salvadoran CEBs in particular. While the CEBs generally do not describe themselves in terms of decoloniality, I posit that they have been decolonizing Christian theology, spirituality, and praxis since their inception five decades ago. Second, I will describe the pastoral method of the CEBs as a process of decolonial knowledge production, identity formation, and social praxis. Third, I will identify the base communities’ praxis of prophetic memory as an outcome of their pastoral method and a foundational touchstone of their decolonial epistemology. Throughout these middle two sections, I will place the method and memory of the CEBs in mutually critical dialogue with the concept of “decolonizing epistemologies,” which has emerged from recent scholarship in decolonial studies but which has been present and active, of course, in the resistance of the colonized in the Americas since the arrival of European conquerors and colonizers in the fifteenth century. Finally, I will conclude with the suggestion that decolonial epistemology is an ongoing, ever-evolving process in the CEBs, as it is and should be in any decolonial movement. It is my hope that this chapter will offer a glimpse, however second-hand, of one of many possible worlds in which decolonial epistemology produces historical openings for the in-breaking of God’s Reign of abundant life for all. 3  I use the language of “the poor” because this is the primary way in which the CEBs of El Salvador refer to themselves and understand their identity, through the lens of class consciousness. In the CEBs, self-identification as “the poor” is a means of expressing solidarity with one another and protesting the injustice of the economic system that subjects the majority of the world to living in poverty.

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Ecclesial Base Communities: An Overview The ecclesial base communities of Latin America in general and El Salvador in particular manifest a geo- and body-politics4 that has been progressively decolonizing the Christian faith tradition, particularly in the realm of ecclesiology, for over 50 years now. The CEBs are small Christian communities of anywhere from just a few to over 100 members that come together to form relationships of human solidarity at the social and economic base of society for the sake of following Jesus of Nazareth in a world marked by inhuman poverty, violence, and oppression. This form of “ecclesiogenesis,”5 or new way of being church, emerged in the years following the Second Vatican Council and the 1968 meeting of Latin American bishops in Medellín, Colombia. Accompanied and empowered by radical priests and religious women, the CEBs began their communal and spiritual formation in simple círculos bíblicos, or biblical circles. The ability to read, listen to, or act out the Biblical narrative in the vernacular and in dialogue with the community was a first step toward decolonizing epistemology and social praxis in the CEBs. Urban workers and campesinos/as alike began to see themselves in the stories of the colonized peoples of the Bible and began to articulate a liberating faith in the God of the poor who desires life and liberation, not oppression and injustice, for the poor and vulnerable. The CEBs proceeded to organize themselves for various communal activities oriented toward liberating faith, worship, and social action. Many members were motivated by their new-found understanding of Christian faith to become involved in popular organizing, radical politics, and even some of the armed revolutionary movements of the late twentieth century. The number of CEBs has diminished in the years since the waning of the revolutionary fervor of those decades. There are various reasons for this, including decades of violent repression, loss of key leaders, and diminished support from the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Furthermore, the base communities that remain and the new ones that have been formed in the twenty-first century do not look exactly like their predecessors. Nevertheless, a significant movement of base communities still exists across Latin America, and the Salvadoran CEBs are amongst the most organized and committed on the continent. The Salvadoran CEBs describe themselves today in the following terms:  See Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking,” in Cultural Studies, 21:2–3 (2007), 449–514.  See Leonardo Boff, Ecclesiogenesis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986). 4 5

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Christian Base Communities are inspired and animated by communal experiences of faith and shared life together. They have become a driving force of change in the Church and society, and inform the theology of liberation. In El Salvador, these communities continue to dedicate themselves to the fight against poverty and injustice on the local, national, and international levels. We are committed to contributing to God’s Kingdom of peace and justice here on earth.6

In this very self-definition, we can already see indications of what Walter Mignolo calls epistemic “de-linking”7 from the coloniality of Roman Catholicism in Latin America, which Enrique Dussel describes in this volume as the hegemonic culture of Christendom.8 Consider the CEBs’ own description of traditional Salvadoran religious life prior to the advent of Salvadoran social conflicts of the mid- to late twentieth century: In the municipalities and local communities, there was an intense religious life. Peasants participated in Catholic ceremonies, as much in the Sunday masses as in special celebrations, such as Holy Week and patron saints’ feast days. The values and conceptions that these religious activities reproduced tended to create the predisposition in peasants to resignedly accept the conditions of their social life, the conditions of poverty and social domination in which they lived. The discourse of the priests was predominated by the spiritualistic conception that Catholics should conform themselves to the life that they were given and offer their sufferings to God, because in this way they would enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.9

In contrast with this colonial legacy of Roman Catholicism, the CEBs’ self-definition implies what their members explicitly insist: it is not God who has ordained the prevailing social order, but sinful human beings. Furthermore, the CEBs refuse to be the passive recipients of religious knowledge imposed from above by their ecclesial oppressors, nor will they 6  CEBES-FUNDAHMER, “Who are we,” FUNDAHMER website. https://fundahmer. wordpress.com/who-are-we/about/ Accessed October 12, 2018. 7  See Mignolo, “Delinking.” However, it is important to note that Mignolo argues against the possibility of decoloniality within a Christian framework. See, for example, “Delinking,” 459. 8  Enrique Dussel, “Epistemological Decolonization of Theology,” in Raimundo Barreto and Roberto Sirvent, Decolonial Christianities: Latinx and Latin American Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p ##. 9  CEB Continental Webpage, “Camino Histórico CEBs Región Centroamérica,” http:// cebcontinental.org/index.php/quienes-somos/historia-de-las-ceb/region-centroamerica. Accessed October 12, 2018.

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simply accept the violence of imposed hierarchies of being and neo-­ colonial power relations. Rather, they insist that it is precisely as el pueblo, the people, or los y las pobres, the poor, that they are a “driving force” for social transformation and an indispensible source for theology. In the CEBs, the church is el pueblo de Dios, the People of God, la iglesia de los y las pobres, the church of the poor. In this self-affirming definition of their communities as church, we can already see the CEBs making what Nelson Maldonado-Torres calls a “decolonial turn” away from a colonial ecclesiology that imposes “imperatives and norms” over them and “keep[s] [them] split from [themselves].”10 Beyond the way in which their self-understanding breaks with colonial Catholicism, the pastoral methodology, daily praxis, and even the organizational layout of the Salvadoran CEBs all perform a de-linking from ecclesial coloniality of knowledge, being, and power. In his “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality,” Maldonado-Torres posits that decolonial praxis is a collective project in which the damnés of the world emerge as agents of epistemological, aesthetic, and social transformation.11 The Salvadoran CEBs embody each of these dimensions of transformative decolonial praxis in their organizational areas of: profecía, or prophetic memory of suffering and martyrdom, denunciation of injustice, and annunciation of another possible world; liturgia, or liturgical celebrations and creative rituals of liberation; and diakonía, which is a term borrowed from Greek to roughly mean service and action for communal well-being, social transformation, and political liberation. Living out their baptismal anointing as prophets, priests, and royal advocates for liberation and God’s reign of life, the CEBs are perpetually creating spaces where decolonial existence breaks through in the church and society. While epistemological decolonizing takes place in each of these three areas of the base communities’ praxis, in the next two sections, I will focus on the foundational epistemic de-linking that takes place in the CEBs’ overall pastoral method and in their praxis of prophetic memory.

10  Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality,” Franz Fanon Foundation Website, http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/ IMG/pdf/maldonado-torres_outline_of_ten_theses-10.23.16_.pdf. Accessed December 18, 2017. 11  Ibid.

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Decolonial Pastoral Method: See-Judge-Act The see-judge-act method of pastoral work and theological reflection is perhaps best known for its use by the Latin American Bishops at Medellín and Puebla and by liberation theologians who both influenced and were influenced by these landmark conferences. Its roots, however, lie in Europe and the work of a Belgian priest named Fr. Joseph Cardijn, who, prior to World War II, coined the methodology and its name and inspired the reflection and action of many Catholic social action groups such as the Young Christian Workers, Young Christian Students, and the Christian Family Movement. In the 1940s Latin American Catholic Action groups, precursors to the ecclesial base communities, were increasingly influenced by Cardijn’s see-judge-act method and young farmers, workers, and students were motivated by it to influence the secular world in which they lived. Methodologically speaking, in both their initial formation and their everyday activities, the base communities typically begin their reflections with observation and analysis of their concrete situation of oppression and injustice (see); they proceed to read that situation in the light of resources from their understanding of the Christian faith tradition (judge); and then they determine how to struggle for transformation of the unjust situation in accordance with the liberating will of God (act). Rather than deductively applying universal (i.e., colonial) doctrinal or theological principles to their particular circumstances, these communities employ an inductive method in which “the situations themselves become theological loci of a discernment which must be made by way of reading the ‘signs of the times’” in light of the word of God.12 It is important to note that this is not a linear process, but rather a dynamic and dialectical method of continual movement in which each stage of the process is related to the others: “In a certain sense, judgment and action are part of seeing. On the other hand, action helps us to move to a new seeing and judgment which are much more profound and illuminating.”13 Prior judgments and actions influence what and how the community sees and, in turn, what they see then leads to a new round of judgment and action.

12  Gregorio Iriarte, Que es una Comunidad Eclesial de Base (Bogotá: Ediciones Paulinas, 1991), 31–32. 13  Ibid., p. 34.

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While the CEBs begin with naming and analyzing their concrete situation in the first step, it is important to note that the entire pastoral-­ hermeneutical circle of see-judge-act is bathed in the light of faith. What the community members see or neglect to see in the first step depends on prior judgments about what is important to see and from what perspective it should be seen. The see-judge-act method, therefore, is not inherently decolonial. Depending on one’s social location within what Anibal Quijano calls the “colonial matrix of power,”14 a colonized or colonizing subject might see only that which reinscribes their positionality in the power matrix. As Luis N. Rivera-Pagán points out in the present volume, the colonized themselves can be imbued with a colonial mindset, for “[c]olonial discourse mystifies imperial dominion. It crafts by persuasion what the mechanisms of coercion are unable to achieve: the fine-tuned consent and admiration of the colonized subjects. It diffuses and affirms imperial ideological hegemony. Its greatest creation is what V. S. Naipaul has called mimic men.”15 Imperial hegemony makes it difficult to see anything but that which reinforces hegemony. What makes the CEBs pastoral method decolonial is that it is founded in a prior stance of decolonial faith and faith-filled decolonial commitment to participate in the preferential option for the poor and oppressed made by God throughout salvation history and most definitively in Jesus Christ. While the poor, their concrete situation, and their experiences as the church of the poor, represent the material starting point for the CEBs’ pastoral/theological reflection, faith is still the formal starting point. As Clodovis Boff maintains in his reflections on the methodology of liberation theology, “[i]t is only methodologically that one begins with ‘seeing’ or ‘reality,’ when in fact faith is always present as the alpha and the omega of the entire process.”16 A decolonial Christian faith requires a prior commitment to seeing, naming, and denouncing that which had previously 14  See Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” in Nepantla: Views from the South 1/3 (2000): 533–580 and “Coloniality and Modernity/ Rationality,” in Cultural Studies 21/2–3 (2007): 168–178. See also, Walter D. Mignolo, “Introduction: Coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking,” in Cultural Studies 21/2–3 (2007): 155–167. 15   Luis N.  Rivera-Pagán, “Towards a Decolonial Theology: Perspectives from the Caribbean,” in Raimundo Barreto and Roberto Sirvent, Decolonial Christianities: Latinx and Latin American Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 45. 16  Clodovis Boff, “Epistemología y Método de la Teología de la Liberación” in Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuría, eds., Mysterium Liberationis: Conceptos Fundamentales de la Teología de la Liberación, Tomo I (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1993), p. 82.

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been obscured and naturalized by the power matrix: the reality of colonial oppression of and violence against the colonized; that is, the reality of coloniality. The CEBs, in their most foundational reflections on their faith and identity as the church of the poor at the base of the church and society, perform what Dussel maintains is already a decolonizing of epistemology and the fundamental condition for the possibility of decolonial theology: “To think theologically from the oppressed colonial subjectivity, and having critical consciousness that this ‘being colonial’ is in fact the theme of this reflection; that is already an act of adopting the perspective of an epistemological de-colonizing of theology. And it is already the transcendental presupposition that conditions the possibility of all theological reflection.”17 Through the see-judge-act method, CEBs cultivate decolonial critical consciousness of and reflection on the reality of “being colonial,” which they have historically named as being los y las pobres—a social class at the base of unjustly imposed ecclesial and social hierarchies. Beyond this decolonial consciousness, the CEBs also cultivate a sense of “believing in” themselves, the poor and peripheral ones, as legitimate and necessary producers of knowledge and subjects of historical reality. This belief in the epistemological authority of the periphery and the “power of the poor in history”18 stems from the decolonial faith commitments described above, but it is cultivated and embodied in, and through, the practice of dialogue as an integral component of the see-judge-act pastoral method. Indeed, another aspect of the CEBs’ implementation of the see-­ judge-­act method that makes it decolonial is the fact that it is implemented as a dialogical process, and not imposed from above. The people’s active participation in the process, not their submission to imposed observations and interpretations, is what allows for and facilitates their formation of communities with decolonial critical consciousness and faith-filled commitment to the transformation of the world.19 In and through such ­participation in the dialogical process of knowledge production and social action, the communal and individual dignity of base communities and  Dussel, “Epistemological Decolonization of Theology,” p ##.  See Gustavo Gutiérrez, The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1983). 19  The pedagogy of the CEBs has much in common with and has arguably been influenced by the work of Paulo Freire, a groundbreaking educator in Brazil, who critiqued traditional (colonial) methods of adult education and developed popular education techniques for literacy training based on concrete, everyday reality of the people. He and his theory became influential worldwide and fell on especially fertile ground in ecclesial base communities and other popular organizations throughout Latin America. See Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1981). 17 18

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their members is affirmed. They are able to tomar la palabra, to take the microphone, so to speak, and offer their questions, insights, and wisdom to the communal process of discernment. It is important to note here that the dignity and divine vocation of the poor have been depreciated throughout history. Colonialism and coloniality operate on the assumption that all that the poor have to offer that is of worth is their land (which was promptly stolen from them under colonialism) and their labor (which continues to be exploited). The word of the poor is worth naught, while the word of the rich is worth everything. In the words of the prophet Sirach, “A rich man speaks and all are silent, his wisdom they extol to the clouds. A poor man speaks and they say, ‘Who is that?’” (Sirach 13:22). This has led the poor themselves to embody a lack of esteem for what they, their own neighbors, and their communities have to contribute. Oftentimes, amongst the poor themselves, “what a laborer says has no weight beside the word of an engineer or a priest.” They may say to one another, “At least they have studied. You are like us, you know nothing.”20 According to Dominique Barbé, “[t]his is why each base community is founded through a gentle and gradual pedagogy, which teaches the humble once again to listen to each other and speak to each other in community; to give worth to what they have to say as they express themselves to each other. It is really the miracle of the healing of the deaf-mute once again.”21 Similarly, the CEBs of El Salvador are challenged with this same habit of low self-worth amongst their members, which hinders full participation: “It is not easy for the poor to participate. They have always been told that they can’t, that they don’t know anything, that they are nothing. They have always been told that sacred things are not for them. One man said to me: ‘Father, I can’t come, I’m not going to get up and embarrass myself!’”22 Having been overlooked and despised for so long has left its mark on those who often have little faith in their own ability to contribute something positive to the construction of a better world. The place of dialogue in the base communities’ see-judge-act method, therefore, opens up space for decolonizing the reigning epistemology of expert knowledge and elitist educational standards. 20  Dominique Barbé, “Church Base Communities” in Liberation Theology: An Introductory Reader, eds. Curt Cadorette, et al. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992), p. 185. 21  Ibid. 22  Comunidades Eclesiales de Base de El Salvador, Una Experiencia de Iglesia: Comunidades Eclesiales de El Salvador, Mística y Metodología (San Salvador, El Salvador: CEBES, 1990), p. 85.

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Prophetic Memory: Decolonizing the Past In and through their pastoral method, the CEBs have been decolonizing epistemology at the base of the church and society for 50 years. One foundational outcome of this process has been their epistemic de-linking from colonial memory. Refusing to accept the colonial version of the past and its implicit vision for the future, the CEBs have reclaimed their own historical memory as an integral component of their identity and a necessary ingredient of their resistance to the violence of imperial hegemony. The CEBs remember the conquest and colonization of Latin America as conquest, not discovery, and, with the collaboration of popular educators and publications from groups like Equipo Maiz in San Salvador,23 they deliberately uncover the coloniality of their history. For example, base community members are generally very cognizant and critical of the way in which land ownership was concentrated in the hands of the oligarchy throughout the course of the nineteenth century. They are cognizant and critical of President Maximiliano Hernández Martínez’s violent repression of an indigenous uprising seeking the redistribution of land in Western El Salvador in 1932. And they are cognizant and critical of how this massacre of tens of thousands of indigenous people rendered visible indigenous identity nearly extinct in twentieth century El Salvador. Most of all, though, the base communities are producers of historical knowledge with regards to the history of the late twentieth century armed conflict in their country. In particular, the CEBs ritually remember the civilian massacres and disappearances, as well as the heroes and martyrs of that conflict, in which nearly 75,000 civilians were killed, mostly by government forces.24  See the Equipo Maiz website at www.equipomaiz.org.sv. Accessed October 12, 2018.  An estimated 75,000 civilians died during El Salvador’s civil war. The United Nations Truth Commission received complaints of over 22,000 serious acts of violence, 60 per cent of which included extrajudicial executions, over 25 per cent of which concerned enforced disappearances, and over 20 per cent of which involved torture. Responsibility for 85 per cent of cases was attributed to agents of the State, including paramilitary groups and death squads. See “From Madness to Hope: The 12-year war in El Salvador,” Report of the U.N. Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, 1993. The report can be found at the following website: https://www.usip.org/files/file/ElSalvador-Report.pdf. Accessed October 12, 2018. Prime targets for acts of violence against opponents by agents of the State were individuals who were involved in activities aimed at the defense of the poor and the promotion of human rights and social justice. These women and men were viewed by the government as “subversives” and were in constant danger of being arrested, tortured, disappeared, and/or executed. In her book-length study of martyrdom and progressive Catholicism in El 23 24

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For example, the base communities take part in yearly anniversary rituals dedicated to remembering massacres committed by the Salvadoran armed forces at Rio Sumpul (+1980, over 600 victims); El Mozote (+1980, nearly 1000 victims); El Calabozo (+1982, over 200 victims); Tenango and Guadalupe (+1983, about 250 victims); and Copapayo (+1983, 142 victims). They also ritually remember the priests and religious women of the Salvadoran popular church, who gave their lives for the people’s liberation struggles, such as Rutilio Grande (+1977), Octavio Ortiz (+1979), Oscar Romero (+1980), Silvia Arrioloa (+1981), and the martyred Jesuits of the University of Central America (+1989). Archbishop Oscar Romero holds pride of place amongst these martyrs, and evidence of his memory is ubiquitous in the CEBs, due to the powerful and very public platform he occupied as the prophetic Archbishop of San Salvador from 1977 until he was assassinated in 1980. Lay catechists and other leaders and members of the CEBs themselves were also targeted, tortured, and murdered by military and paramilitary forces during the years leading up to and during El Salvador’s Civil War (1980–1992). These martyrs are less recognized and remembered, but certain base communities are making efforts to recuperate the memory of their own communities’ stories from the war years, including the stories of their leaders and other loved ones who were killed. For example, in the hamlets of Cacaopera, in the northeastern Department of Morazán, the women of the base communities are currently in the process of recording and reflecting on their memories of communal resistance to violence and oppression before, during, and after the war. These efforts contribute to the ongoing decolonization of history and the reclaiming of historical epistemology by those whom colonial history has tried to erase. I have argued elsewhere,25 drawing on the CEBs’ memory of the massacre of El Mozote, that practices of remembering suffering in the base communities of El Salvador have been a means of both interrupting the dominant narratives of imperial hegemony and forming the Salvador, Anna L. Peterson indicates that, by March of 1980, government-sponsored forces were committing five to eight hundred political murders per month. See Peterson, Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador’s Civil War (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 35. Those who lost their lives as a consequence of their faith-filled commitment to justice are remembered as martyrs by the base communities of El Salvador. 25  See Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo, “Remembering the Massacre at El Mozote: A Case for Dangerous Memory of Suffering as Christian Formation in Hope,” in International Journal of Practical Theology 17/1 (2013): 62–87.

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CEBs in their communal and individual identities as moral agents of resistance to violence and oppression in the past and present. Furthermore, I argue that this practice of “dangerous memory”26 both nurtures an alternative imagination within the CEBs and inspires them to action for an alternative future based on that imagination. While I did not use the language of decoloniality at the time that I made these arguments, each of these elements and effects of the base communities’ historical memory contribute to their epistemic de-linking from colonized accounts of the past in which their heroes, martyrs, and lost loved ones are erased from history or dehumanized and blamed for their own demise (as terrorists, etc.). In and through their practices of remembering the suffering of the colonized, the CEBs engage in epistemological decolonization of not only the past, but also of visions for a more just future in which an-other world is possible. The stories of the CEBs will undoubtedly contribute to fulfilling Chinua Achebe’s hope, cited by Luis N. Rivera-Pagán in his chapter for this volume: that the twenty-first century “will see the first fruits . . . of the process of ‘re-storying’ peoples who had been knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession.”27

Iglesia Peregrina: A Decolonial Journey Scholars in decolonial studies often write about decolonial epistemology and praxis as if it has been, is, or could be embodied as a pure and unadulterated mode of being in history, once and for all.28 The experiences of the Salvadoran base communities, however, point to another way of ­understanding the decolonization of epistemology: as a journey or an ongoing process that must always be critically engaged and examined lest we think we have arrived at our destination when we are really only resting by the wayside. The CEBs of the twentieth century did not embody decoloniality in its fullness, for coloniality is so deeply embedded and embodied in the Americas that it is nearly impossible to uproot in its entirety. For example, the patriarchal node of the colonial matrix of 26  This term is borrowed from Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Towards a Practical Fundamental Theology (New York: Crossroad, 2007). 27  Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, “Towards a Decolonial Theology,” p. 9, citing Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 79. 28  For example, Walter Mignolo asserts that any taint of either Marxism or Christianity (even as expressed in theologies of liberation) render a theory or praxis incapable of true decoloniality. See e.g., Mignolo, “Delinking,” 459.

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power persisted throughout much of the formation of the CEBs in those early decades. However, the CEBs in the twenty-first century have begun to critically examine this aspect of coloniality and are in the process of undoing colonial hierarchies of gender. Furthermore, unlike the indigenous communities that Silvia Marcos highlights in this volume, it is only in recent years that the CEBs of El Salvador have been able to recover some of the indigenous heritage, cosmovision, and ritual practices of their ancestors.29 Therefore, the CEBs of the twenty-first century do not embody decoloniality in the same way as the earlier base communities, but neither do they necessarily embody decoloniality more fully than their predecessors. The CEBs in the twenty-­first century are inundated with new forms of coloniality that they must critically examine and resist. For example, the advent of new technologies even in rural communities (most fundamentally television, but also smartphones) has presented new challenges for resisting cultural hegemony, alongside new opportunities for democratic participation and de-linking from colonial epistemologies. For example, as the elders who remember suppressed indigenous rituals pass on, young people from Cacaopera can now search YouTube for videos that reconnect them with their Kakawira identity and offer them resources for integrating this identity with their decolonial Christian faith. While the CEBs have set in motion and sing with pride about the decolonial process of “the poor believing in the poor,” they also recognize that this process is an ongoing journey. In the language of decolonial Christian faith, they also sing that their communities form part of an iglesia peregrina, a pilgrim church. Given the persistence and insidiousness of ­coloniality in human history, this pilgrim people is continually en camino hacia el reino de Dios, on a journey to the Reign of God. Where and whenever the CEBs embody decolonial ways of knowing and being in the midst of coloniality, that Reign breaks into history and inspires decolonial hope for a world in which many worlds are free to exist and enjoy life in abundance. Que así sea.

29  Laurel Anne Marshall describes how recovery and valorization of rural and indigenous lifeways has been an integral part of a project called Escuela Campesina in the base communities of Cacaopera, Morazán. See Laurel Anne Marshall, “Campesina School: Popular Agroecological Education in Ecclesial Base Communities in El Salvador,” in Lillian Dube, et  al., eds, Valuing Lives, Healing Earth. See also “Escuela Campesina,” FUNDAHMER website, https://fundahmerespanol.wordpress.com/proyectos/desarrollo-humano/escuela-campesina/ Accessed October 12, 2018.

CHAPTER 14

Reimagining the Church as a Decolonial Ally: Pedro Casaldáliga’s Liturgies of Repentance Ann Hidalgo

In a volume on decolonial Christianities, it seems peculiar to write a chapter featuring the work of a European man. This chapter, however, investigates two instances in which the Roman Catholic Church has responded to the moral problems raised by the history of its involvement in the project of colonization and its ongoing complicity with racial discrimination and abuse. In Brazil during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga wrote two liturgies of repentance: Missa da terra sem males (Mass of the Land without Evil), an expression of remorse and apology on the part of the Church addressed to the indigenous peoples of Brazil for the wrongs committed against them both past and present, and its companion piece, Missa dos Quilombos (Mass of the Quilombos), which repents for the Church’s sins against the Afro-Brazilian community. Inspiring and worthy of critical attention, the liturgies draw their strength in part from Casaldáliga’s own position of relative power: he is a European-born, white male who, as a bishop at the time of the composition of these works, held a position of considerable standing in the Roman Catholic Church. When the Masses premiered, he had authority to speak A. Hidalgo (*) Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_14

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publicly on behalf of the institution, and he used that authority to say we were wrong; we apologize; and we commit to walking in solidarity with you in the future. By selecting the Catholic Mass as the vehicle for these expressions of repentance, Casaldáliga foregrounds the moral character of this commitment. These are not secular apologies; rather, they employ the language of sacramental theology to identify the actions of the Church as sin, express remorse, and pledge to atone. Although the liturgies have shortcomings, they nevertheless demonstrate a commitment to support and encourage decolonial efforts. To be clear, decolonial projects do not require the permission or support of institutions; they arise of their own promptings in the face of oppression and answer to their own constituencies. Yet if the Church wishes to be true to its moral commitments and to act as a relevant force in society, it must admit that it has been wrong and act to redress the harms it has done. Only then can it stand in partnership as an ally to decolonial projects. This chapter explores how Casaldáliga became conscientized, examines the historical context in which Casaldáliga and his collaborators composed the liturgies, and analyzes key passages from each work. It concludes with a proposal to adopt Casaldáliga’s model of liturgies of repentance as a way for the Church to transform its history and walk in solidarity with vulnerable communities as a decolonial ally.

Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga Pedro Casaldáliga was born in 1928 in the fiercely independent Catalonia region of Spain.1 At an early age, his Catalonian roots may have sensitized him to colonial practices and prompted him to recognize the ways in which culture can be imposed under the guise of religion. After a first missionary assignment in Africa, in 1968 he was assigned to the rural Brazilian state of Mato Grosso in the heart of the South American continent. As he engaged in his ministerial work, he gradually perceived the magnitude of the transformation needed in order for the Church to serve genuinely in Brazil and pledged to make that effort the cornerstone of his career.2 Casaldáliga was appointed bishop in 1971, continued to work in Brazil until his retirement in 2003, and lives there still. 1  Pedro Casaldáliga, I Believe in Justice and Hope, trans. Joseph C. Daries (Notre Dame: Fides/Claretian, 1978), 9. 2  Casaldáliga, Justice and Hope, 19.

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The early years in Mato Grosso profoundly shaped Casaldáliga’s thinking. He claims it was the continuous suffering of the people—poor health, lack of proper sanitation, unemployment, illiteracy, social marginalization—that forced him and his fellow missionaries to overhaul their preconceived vision of ministry and to dedicate themselves to living in solidarity with the community.3 In a particularly poignant passage, Casaldáliga describes his experience of conscientization: The awakening of Africa won me over to its cause, and unmasked for me the camouflaged colonialisms that I once thought of as discovery and evangelization. America was no longer just one more glory of Spain’s great navigators… I knew about the hunger, the illiteracy, and the exploitation of the New World and of the whole Third World and its people, by the first and second worlds… Since then I have fully grasped and felt the whole rotten myth of racist superiority, divinely-decreed eminent domain and inhuman exploitation that has gone into the discovery, colonization, and at times, even the evangelization of the New World.4

Casaldáliga came to believe that service in the Church required a commitment to the lifestyle of the local community, which meant adopting the community’s modes of housing, food, and dress in an effort to share in their struggles and hopes.5 If the Church is to contribute meaningfully to the lives of people who are poor, Casaldáliga insisted on the need to overcome the dichotomy between “a church that walks in the clouds and a humanity that steps into mud-puddles.”6 In the 1970s, the cause of the indigenous peoples began to take on a new urgency. Although his work in rural areas in the interior of Brazil had brought him into contact with people in dire poverty, Casaldáliga began to realize that the indigenous peoples lived in even more desperate conditions. In 1974, he and many of the missionaries signed a manifesto in defense of the indigenous peoples called Y-Juca-Pirama (“He Who Must Die”).7 While official government rhetoric urged indigenous communities to be integrated into the national community, Casaldáliga began to

 Casaldáliga, Justice and Hope, 28, 30.  Casaldáliga, Justice and Hope, 204–5. 5  Casaldáliga, Justice and Hope, 179. 6  Casaldáliga, Justice and Hope, 188–89. 7  Casaldáliga, Justice and Hope, 122. 3 4

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a­ dvocate for self-determination of the tribal nations and official recognition of claims to territory and indigenous languages.8 In 1976 Casaldáliga wrote a penitential litany for the funeral of two missionaries and four Bororo Indians who were murdered by landholders encroaching on a small village in Mato Grosso. In the litany Casaldáliga addresses the collective wrongs that the Church must repair in its relationship with the indigenous peoples.9 The litany begins: For all the sins of the old and new colonization that for centuries has been crushing the native peoples of our America, we ask forgiveness. (Forgive us, Lord, forgive us.) For the sins of the church itself, so often an instrument of colonialism, old and new… For the pride and ignorance with which we show contempt for the culture of native peoples, in the name of a civilization hypocritically called Christian….10

This litany begins to develop the ideas and the tone that Casaldáliga would use in the Missa da terra sem males that would debut three years later. Missa da terra sem males The Brazilian bishops declared 1978 the Year of the Martyrs of the Indigenous Cause to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the death of three Jesuit martyrs who had died in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. In response, indigenous activists protested that it was unjust to commemorate only the deaths of the three Jesuits when so many more had perished during the missionizing process carried out in the name of the Christian Empires of Spain and Portugal.11 Antônio Cechin, a brother of the Marist order and historian, first imagined the Missa da terra sem males during a visit to the ruins of the site of an eighteenth-­ century massacre of Guarani people by joint Spanish and Portuguese 8  Casaldáliga, Justice and Hope, 143. See also Pedro Casaldáliga, In Pursuit of the Kingdom: Writings: 1968–1988 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), 57. 9  Casaldáliga, Pursuit, 61. 10  Casaldáliga, Pursuit, 61. 11  Pedro Casaldáliga and Pedro Tierra, “Missa da terra sem males” (liturgy), Servicios Koinonia, accessed January 12, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20160426042307/ http://www.servicioskoinonia.org/Casaldaliga/poesia/terra.htm

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f­ orces.12 Cechin suggested the project to Casaldáliga who embraced it readily and chose as collaborators the poet Pedro Tierra13 and the composer Martín Coplas.14 The Missa da terra sem males premiered at the Cathedral of Sé in São Paulo on April 22, 1979, at a Mass celebrated by almost 40 bishops.15 Casaldáliga and Tierra both wrote extensive introductions to the Missa that are available with publications of the lyrics.16 Both authors note that the Missa was very intentionally crafted as a Catholic Mass, not an oratorio or a performance piece. Tierra explains that it was necessary for this project to take shape as a Mass because the history of the indigenous peoples of the Americas cannot be separated from the presence of the Church among them.17 He writes, “The same Church that blessed the swords of the conquistadors and made a sacrament of the massacre and extermination of entire peoples, in this Mass covers itself in ashes and makes its own profound penance.”18 While repentance alone does not begin to make reparation for what has been done, Tierra hopes that the Missa will lead people to acknowledge the profound ties that still exist between the Church and oppressed peoples and inspire in them a commitment to walk alongside those who seek liberation.19 Casaldáliga believes it is important to acknowledge the Church’s ongoing failures with respect to indigenous peoples, which include an  Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa da terra sem males.”  Pedro Tierra is the pseudonym of Hamilton Pereira da Silva, a longtime political activist and more recently Brazilian public official. See Leonhard Creutzberg, “Pedro Tierra,” Portal Luteranos, last modified June 29, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20160426043001/ http://www.luteranos.com.br/conteudo/pedro-tierra-1948 14  Martín Coplas is a composer from Argentina who traces his ancestry to both the Quechua and Aymara peoples. He specializes in folk music traditions and is particularly interested in the exchange among various folk styles. See Leonhard Creutzberg, “Martin Coplas,” Portal Luteranos, last modified June 29, 2012, https://web.archive.org/ web/20160426042641/http://www.luteranos.com.br/conteudo/martin-coplas 15  A 30-minute film version produced by Verbo Filmes intersperses footage from the premiere with scenes from a Paraguayan Guarani village: Cónrado Berning, “Missa da Terra Sem Males,” YouTube video, 35:02, Verbo Filmes, 1979, digitized and posted by Armazém Memória, October 5, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBNqtK-VF5g 16  See, for example, Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa da terra sem males” (liturgy), Servicios Koinonia, accessed January 12, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20160426042307/ http://www.servicioskoinonia.org/Casaldaliga/poesia/terra.htm 17  Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa da terra sem males.” 18  Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa da terra sem males.” 19  Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa da terra sem males.” 12 13

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­ nwillingness to encourage the development of genuinely indigenous u forms of Catholicism and the lack of prophetic critique of unjust legislative and judicial actions by the government. In addition, Casaldáliga likens the exploitative actions of modern multinational corporations to the abuses of the conquistadors, whose greed displaced indigenous peoples from their lands, forced them into hard labor, and extracted the natural wealth of the earth for the benefit of the empire.20 Tierra emphasizes that the Missa is a response to the unspeakable violence that has been perpetrated on the indigenous peoples for centuries. He notes that the title Missa da terra sem males originated with the Guarani people, who envisioned a land without evil. For Tierra the fact that the Guarani dreamed of a land without evil instead of a heaven without evil is an ideal link to this liberation-centered Mass that dares to mobilize people to work for a possible utopia.21 The Missa da terra sem males follows the structure of the canonical Catholic Mass with a heavy emphasis on the penitential rite. The Penitential Memory is the heart of the Missa; its lyrics comprise almost half of the sung texts of the Mass. Casaldáliga describes it as a dialogue between the indigenous peoples of America, represented by solo voices, and the collective consciousness of the colonizing and missionizing civilization, represented by the chorus.22 The opening declaration sung by the chorus establishes the tone for the whole piece: “Heirs of an empire of massacre, sons of secular domination, we want to make amends for our sins, we come to celebrate a new option: Resurrection.”23 The chorus describes the Christian paradigm of movement from passion to resurrection and explains that the indigenous peoples have suffered but are still awaiting the joy of resurrection.24 The solo voice issues a challenge to the chorus, “Brothers who came from afar, if you would like to be brothers, listen to my song!” and the chorus accepts, “We would like to hear with open hearts… we would like

 Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa da terra sem males.”  Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa da terra sem males.” 22  Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa da terra sem males.” For a more extended analysis and critique of the Casaldáliga liturgies, please see Ann Hidalgo, “Liberating Liturgy: Voices of Latin American Theology” (PhD diss., Claremont School of Theology, 2015), https:// archive.org/details/HidalgoLiberatingLiturgy51916/page/n1 23  Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa da terra sem males.” 24  Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa da terra sem males.” 20 21

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to repair the history of this land.”25 The following sections are a series of exchanges in which a voice for the indigenous peoples describes an aspect of their community’s life before the conquest and the chorus responds by admitting to the invaders’ destruction of this lifestyle. The indigenous voices describe cultures that existed for millennia in harmony with nature and had freedom of movement, access to land for hunting and planting crops, clean water and clean air, abundant food, good physical health, particular styles of dress, cultural expressions, and systems of cosmology. In response to each claim, the chorus details how each of these aspects of the indigenous lifestyles was disrupted. The chorus sings: “We destroyed them, full of our own superiority, denying the identity of the other Peoples, all members of the Human Family.” The indigenous voices acknowledge that their societies were not perfect but insist that they were better than that imposed by the colonizers: “I had my sins and I was involved in my own wars, but I did not turn the law into a lie or profit into a god.” The chorus responds: “And we, unfaithful to the Gospel, missionized you… unfaithful to the Gospel of the Incarnate Word, we gave you a foreign culture as the message.” As the piece progresses the dialogue moves from the historical era of the conquest to more recent complaints. The chorus admits that “we have relegated you to displays and reserves, to zoological parks, to dusty archives… we intoxicated you with sugar cane brandy and disdain. We made you the object of impudent tourism… we have thrown your language into a grave of silence and your survivors to the side of the road….”26 In the final exchange of the Penitential Memory, the musical style changes and increases in intensity as a solo voice declaims: “I was all of America, I am still America, I am the new America.” The chorus responds with a commitment that recognizes the intimate ties between the indigenous communities and the dominant population and pledges solidarity: “And we are now, still and forever, the inheritors of your blood, the sons of your dead, and allies of your cause, reviving the memory in the alliance of this Easter.”27

 Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa da terra sem males.”  Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa da terra sem males.” 27  Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa da terra sem males.” 25 26

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Missa dos Quilombos Following the Missa da terra sem males, Casaldáliga began a new project, the Missa dos Quilombos, to address the Afro-Brazilian population and express the Church’s repentance for its direct and complicit roles in the slave trade and its ongoing failure to help bring about justice. The quilombos mentioned in the title were communities built by fugitive slaves, the most famous of which was the Quilombo of Palmares in Northeastern Brazil. Afro-Brazilian activists have long claimed Palmares and Zumbi, its last leader, as important symbols of resistance for the Black community, and the Missa draws on this rich history. The modern situation of inequity in Brazil has its roots in the slave trade that brought African slaves to the Portuguese colony of Brazil starting in the mid-sixteenth century. Although the slave trade ended in 1850 and slavery was abolished in 1888, the governing powers that wrote the abolition of slavery into law made no attempt to alter the social, economic, educational, cultural, and religious systems that surrounded and upheld the institution of slavery. The pernicious effects of coloniality are a daily reality for members of the Afro-Brazilian community as they continue to struggle with the legacy of slavery and face entrenched discrimination, lack of educational opportunities, lack of financial capital for advancement, and cultural biases against dark skin. In the 1970s Afro-Brazilian activists began a new phase of their efforts to promote Black consciousness by opening centers of Afro-Brazilian studies at universities and founding civic centers for Black culture and aesthetics. In 1980, the Brazilian government established the Zumbi Memorial, a national historical park on the site of the Quilombo of Palmares in the state of Alagoas. Casaldáliga attended the opening ceremony representing the progressive sector of the Catholic Church. He stated that the Church’s presence at the ceremony was a penitential act for its failings over the centuries and, he hoped, the sign of a new consciousness arising in the Church.28 The prominent Archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara29 encouraged Casaldáliga and Tierra to write this Mass addressing the plight of the   Selma Suely Teixeira, “Missa dos Quilombos: um canto de Axé,” Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, accessed April 3, 2015, https://web.archive.org/ web/20160426044116/http://www.dacex.ct.utfpr.edu.br/selma2.htm 29  Hélder Câmara (1909–1999) was archbishop of Olinda and Recife from 1964 until his retirement in 1985. He was a strong supporter of liberation theology and outspoken critic of the Brazilian military dictatorship. 28

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­ fro-­Brazilian population.30 Câmara and Casaldáliga both played active A roles in the Fundação Centro de Educação Comunitária e Social do Nordeste (CECOSNE), an organization in Recife, Brazil founded in 1975 to connect church and social movements. Câmara and other artists, musicians, and poets met with Casaldáliga and Tierra at CECOSNE and developed the initial outlines of the Mass.31 They also decided that the premiere of the Missa should take place on the anniversary of Zumbi’s death, the Brazilian Day of Black Consciousness.32 Câmara later introduced Casaldáliga and Tierra to their musical collaborator, popular Brazilian performer and composer Milton Nascimento.33 Seven thousand people attended the premiere of the Missa on November 22, 1981, in the plaza in front of the Igreja do Carmo in the city of Recife in northeastern Brazil.34 The location has deep historic resonance with the theme of the Missa since Domingos Jorge Velho had displayed the severed head of the ambushed Zumbi in that same plaza in 1695.35 Casaldáliga and Câmara co-presided at the liturgy with Archbishop José Maria Pires, the first black bishop of Brazil.36 Casaldáliga’s introduction to the Mass states his premise clearly: “In the name of a supposedly white and colonizing God, whom Christian nations have adored as if He were the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, millions of Blacks have been subjected for centuries to slavery, to desperation, and to death.”37 Drawing on a favorite theme of liberation  Rafael Senra, “A Missa dos Quilombos: Produto Político, Religioso e Cultural,” Darandina 2, no. 3 (2009): 1, accessed April 4, 2015, http://www.ufjf.br/darandina/ files/2010/01/Rafael-Senra-.pdf 31  Marcelo Nassif, “Missa dos Quilombos, D. Helder Câmara, Invocação à Mariama,” Blog do Bruxo, June 9, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20160426043609/http://blogdobruxo.com.br/page/noticia/missa-dos-quilombos-d-helder-camara-invocacAo-A-mariama-. “Quem somos,” CECOSNE, accessed on Dec. 10, 2015, https://web.archive.org/ web/20160426043844/http://www.cecosne.org.br/quemsomos.html 32  Nassif, “Missa dos Quilombos.” 33  Romero Venâncio, “Milton Canta Zumbi na Missa Dos Quilombos: Notas,” Consciência. net, last modified November 15, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20160426044305/ http://consciencia.net/milton-canta-zumbi-na-missa-dos-quilombos-notas/ 34  Senra, “A Missa dos Quilombos,” 1. 35  Venâncio, “Milton Canta Zumbi.” 36  Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 219. 37   Pedro Casaldáliga and Pedro Tierra, “Missa dos Quilombos” (liturgy), Servicios Koinonia, accessed Jan. 12, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20160426042400/ http://www.servicioskoinonia.org/Casaldaliga/poesia/quilombos.htm 30

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t­heologians, Casaldáliga uses the biblical story of the Exodus as a central image. He retells the history of slave resistance to the colonial government, especially the history of the quilombos, as a new version of the story of the Israelite slaves in Egypt. Palmares becomes the Black Sinai and Zumbi the Black Moses. Casaldáliga acknowledges that the Brazilian Christian community will have mixed responses to this Mass, explaining that while some will consider it scandalous, “many who are repentant” will be relieved by the long-overdue confession of Christian guilt.38 The powerful gathering song, “Estamos chegando” (“We are arriving”), speaks with the voices of the slaves of the past and the modern Afro-­ Brazilians who suffer in a racist society. It honors the historical memory of the slaves and contributes to the formation of a modern Black consciousness.39 The first quatrain is as follows: “We are arriving from the depths of the earth/We are arriving from the womb of the night/Whipped flesh we are/We have come to remember.”40 Subsequent verses describe the passage across the sea from Africa to Brazil, the suffering and fear that were part of the daily lives of the slaves, the slaves’ work on the plantations and in the mines, as well as the modern realities of life in the favelas and work in factories that creates wealth for the owners and investors but not the workers. The lyrics name the Church as a source of further suffering, not of solace: “We are bleeding from the cross of Baptism.”41 As the song progresses, the lyrics shift from sadness and mourning to a new resolve and recognition of the people’s strength. This progression is evident in the last line of each verse (“We have come to…”): remember, weep, pray, nurture, eulogize, dance, sing, shimmy, collect, yell, cry out, and fight.42 The extended “Rito Penitencial” is the heart of the Missa, functioning as a cry for help rather than a plea for the forgiveness of sins. Alternating between sung choral passages and recited solo sections, the piece laments the suffering of generations upon generations of Blacks in Brazil, describing the physical suffering experienced by both the slaves of the past and the Afro-Brazilians of the present living in poverty as well as the psychological suffering that results from having one’s culture and historical memory scattered and devalued.  Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa dos Quilombos.”  Teixeira, “Missa dos Quilombos.” 40  Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa dos Quilombos.” 41  Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa dos Quilombos.” 42  Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa dos Quilombos.” 38 39

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After the traditional invocation “Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison,” the piece establishes its intent to undo the traditional associations of color with moral worthiness: “The soul is not white, grief is not black.” The authors acknowledge the suffering caused by forced conversions to Christianity, criticizing both the baptisms that “branded the slaves with iron for salvation” and the intolerance that forced the slaves to hide their cultural and religious traditions. The chorus sings: “In fear – in fear of history  – we burned our archives. We put our memories in white.” Later the soloist recites: “The Black was whitened for survival. (The White was blackened for mockery.) The whitened Black was gently killed by integration.”43 The final recited section implores religious leaders not to deny the blood, the cry of the dead, the strength of the people, or the return to quilombos.44 The authors seem to want to honor the founders of the quilombos and the Afro-Brazilians of the present for their resistance to the degradation of slavery and the legacy of coloniality, as well as to call the Church to account for its past and present sins. Their focus on the quilombos, however, presents an ambiguous position: if Afro-Brazilians ought to return to the ideals of the quilombos that honored their African heritage in order to reclaim their human dignity, why should they retain the imposed Christianity that caused so much suffering to their ancestors?

The Church as a Decolonial Ally In her anchor article for this volume, “Mesoamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality: Decolonizing Religious Beliefs,” Sylvia Marcos describes the Mexican bishops’ message to the organizers of the First Indigenous Women’s Summit of the Americas in 2002. In condescending tones, the bishops scold the indigenous women for not behaving appropriately and for not accepting the identity the bishops deemed appropriate for them.45 Sadly, this example is just one of many in which the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has failed to recognize shared humanity and has, instead, discriminated against its own members.

 Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa dos Quilombos.”  Casaldáliga and Tierra, “Missa dos Quilombos.” 45  Sylvia Marcos, “Mesoamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality: Decolonizing Religious Beliefs,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 25, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 32. 43 44

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Archbishop José Maria Pires, one of the co-presiders of the premiere of the Missa dos Quilombos, tells an anecdote with similar resonance. Pires explains that he came to an understanding of black consciousness as he was preparing for the Latin American Bishops’ meeting in Puebla in 1978. He received a letter from a group of young, Black activists who felt that the Church in Brazil looked down on Blacks and their cause. The activists closed their letter by writing: “As a black person, you are our brother. As a bishop, you are our adversary.”46 Pires describes that he was deeply moved by their words and was inspired to dedicate his life to working for the cause of Blacks both inside and outside the Church. While his personal response is admirable, it begs the question: How might the Church as a whole make a similar commitment? Pedro Casaldáliga’s liturgies of repentance demonstrate one way in which the Church might transform and renew itself. The Missa da terra sem males and the Missa dos Quilombos together model a crucial three-step process: acknowledging the Church’s wrongdoings, apologizing for the harms it has caused, and committing to walk in solidarity with vulnerable communities. Although the liturgies have clear shortcomings—both can be criticized for romanticizing, collapsing distinct traditions into homogenized identities, and co-opting cultural elements—they nevertheless present a vision of the Church that recognizes its present failings without losing sight of the possibility of future transformation. Today, as always, the Church has the opportunity to reimagine itself. This is difficult work that requires an unflinching assessment of past and present behavior. If it were to embrace Casaldáliga’s model of the liturgy of repentance, the Church could begin to transform interactions of disrespect and marginalization into relationships of mutuality. By honoring its own moral commitments, the Church can take steps toward healing relationships with indigenous peoples and people of African descent, with women, with victims of sexual abuse by clergy, with members of the LGBTQ community, with members of other faith traditions, and with other groups that it has marginalized. By publicly acknowledging wrongdoings, apologizing for the harms it has caused, and committing to a future of solidarity, the Church has the opportunity to reimagine itself as a decolonial ally.

46  Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 223–24.

PART V

Conclusion

CHAPTER 15

A Decolonial Prayer Cláudio Carvalhaes

Dear God, G∗, Goddess Querida/o/x Deus/Deusa, Estimadx Dios, I call on you not knowing how to call you. I don’t know under what principality I am when I say your name. When I pronounce your name, am I under the wings of your love or the paws of something evil? Who am I speaking with when I address you as my God? And hear, Oh God, I mean not you, but those who are actually with me when I utter your name? Whose project am I under when I offer myself to you? How can I escape the spirit of the world, especially a nationalistic world, when I speak to you? How can I make the you I say not become my propriety or simply my compulsions and consumptions? How do I say your name by losing myself into the fullness of my own dis-appropriation?1 1  “A veces le llamo S/N (sin nombre), a veces dios-cómplice, a veces nada. Como a menudo lo he explicado, pienso que cada cual tiene derecho a inventar su propio dios y a diseñar su propia gnosis.” Pániker, Salvador. Adiós a casi todo (Diarios de Pániker 5) (Spanish Edition) (Kindle Locations 32–34). Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial España. Kindle Edition.

C. Carvalhaes (*) Union Theological Seminary, New York City, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_15

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I’d rather start my prayer by speaking somebody else’s words, appropriating the voice of this precious Vietnamese sister and her prayer when she (does not) pray(s): Somewhere in the process the flowers wither and the whole world smells of open wounds. The peculiar odor of fire powder, dust and dirt, concrete and steel; the very odor is blood, carbolic acid, decaying insides and burnt carnality has been trapped for some time in the air, but only the child in me – a child of the war – notices it. The wounded adult-me weeps at the sight of wreckage, loudly deplores the tragedies, vocally condemns the abuses, when visually gets inoculated with the constant reply on screen of serialized destruction. And, when the shock has faded, finds it quasi natural to move about band-aided with an invisible muffler. The dis-ease goes on unacknowledged. The toxic spill effect, felt but largely unseen is slowly laying waste in the overexposed cities  – these immense man-made wildernesses where its inhabitants caught in between walls of metal, zinc or concrete have little access to the light innerscape of blood flowers. Again the heart meanders for no one knows why. Sudan, Tiber, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Rwanda, Congo, Burma, and… and… and, with the recurring specters of Bosnia, Kosovo, South Africa, Cambodia, Vietnam. What is it that makes both talks and silences stained with shame? Everyone readily comes up with an answer and everyone is eager to fill in the blanks. But once raised, the question never fails to fold back, returning to just where one thinks one last knows. Rising like the murmurs of an underground river, it persists in infinite whisperings, striking randomly when it is least expected. Could it be the sound? The places in sight? The lie, the fear, the excess, or, that shadow of a frail body in flight? Sometimes the mind freezes and the heart goes on fasting: name, nation, identity, citizenship disappear. Once I was a human.2

My sister helps me name my inability to speak after seeing so many human cruelties and unnameable disasters. For, when I present myself to you in prayer, I am ashamed of what we have become, a form of human species that has been able to build wonderful things but in this process of creation has destroyed everything. I am now speaking to you from the end of what we call life, at the edge of our common living, at the dawn of our own constructions/civilizations. I come to you knowing how to answer you where my brothers and sisters are. Do you see that miserable child drinking dirty water from the city grounds? That is where my sisters and 2  Trinh T. Minh-ha, Lovecidal, Walking with the Disappeared (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2016), 1.

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brothers are, oh God. My problem in praying to you is that I don’t know how to answer you why they are there, with their bodies frail, at the end of their ability to hold on. So I call your name from an “off-shore call center,” a center outside of the real centers where life moves, on behalf of those who own these centers. I call you from a nonplace, a stance of vulnerability, where my voice tops the voices of millions of people whose death is necessary so others can live. I come from a nonplace where human beings are called “human resources.” I am sorry, in these places, people speak with accents. I pray you understand my prayer even if I don’t understand myself. I am calling on you from the nonplaces that function as subsidiaries of the modern thinking of Europe, the worldview of the United States, and the growing control by China. The temporary nonplace where voice sounds so nasal, underdeveloped, unfinished, using very slow speed internet. It’s not drugs, God. There is no way not to live high in these times. Oh God, how you have changed through the years, unbelievable! How did you make it here? I remember when, in my naiveté, the objectivity of my thinking was once my own salvation. I could reach the skies of proper academic work and be counted among the intellectuals! That eventually got me a very nice job, which I still have! But now, I realize, these forms of objectivity were another trap of the business-like profit, money orienting all forms of education. May I still believe that there is some agency in this? Agency for/of my own people? My delusional and triumphalist academic work is what preserves me. Have I become trapped into the rationalization of the European enlightenment that tells me: either Greek-Western thinking or barbarism! I am holding myself back from telling you about all of the deaths and oppression that are stored in the memory of my eyes, but I don’t want to bother you with the obvious. I confess that I can only pray like Walter Benjamin who saw the angel of history, looking back and seeing all the debris of tragedies piling up in human history, death and graves and demolitions. All that the angel of history tells us is that more afflictions are coming for the past clearly shows it. Instead of finding something new, something that will help us re-create the world accordingly, we are going to relive again the historic demons we didn’t face in the past. God of all disasters, how do we learn to move toward the future without assurances of transformation, and with the certainties that unfathomable disasters are coming our way? Can your presence help us become able

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to travel within dangerous memories of the past so our future can be more than the self-enclosed destinies of our doomed rhetoric of progress and naïve hope? From this call center, serving the big centers of theology, I pray I see and feel the angelus novus alive in me, doing me every morning and shuffling its wings every night if possible, perhaps illuminating both our past and future, as to reorder our present in new worlds of possibilities for this earth, for all of us. From this call center I cry to you, oh God. I pray I can see beyond the pillage of bodies everywhere; I pray I can listen to sounds beyond the ones of bullets and death silence; I pray I can smell the scent of flowers and the forests beyond the strong acid, dry smell of the earth burning for our consumption; I pray I can drink and swim in the waters of rivers and the sea while we still have water to drink and the sea life is still there; I pray I can hear somebody else pray to you, other than you, not You; I pray I can touch the bodies of my grandchildren with the lightness of an open viable future; that I can taste the salty waters of my tears turning into honeydew in the mouth of all those who are arriving. But God I confess it is so hard. Again, I call your name from the ass-­ holes of the Americas, the shitty places nobody pays attention to, the call centers of broken bodied, broken hearted, and broken spirited people. Those who are the dammed, doubly disfigured people, those who try to self-renovate and self-disguise through resistance and assimilation as to keep going with their lives hanging by a thread.3 Disfiguring and being disfigured, time and again, indigenous, blacks, women, children, queer, Palestinians, poor people. They are mine and I am theirs, even when the very us embedded in theirs them are so difficult to describe, even when we are pitted against each other for the sake of sacred wars, capitalistic consumerism, and political conquering. May I never forget the only thing I might know: we share the same humus/humanness, the same stardust that composes us, the same glory, the same earth, the same wind, the same wonder. I call you from the centers of power about the off-shore center calls, to talk to you about decolonialidad. Bullshit as everything else, but perhaps a necessary one, with the hopes of disentangling our vocabulary, our prayer grammar, our imperial forms of knowledge, and other forms of knowing so we can birth old and new ways of living and being and praying.

3  Rey Chow, Not like a Native Speaker. On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2014), 8.

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From these center calls I call on you oh God! Places of faith that render your name so frail. When we speak your name from these places we are thrown into ambiguities. And for both yes and no and maybes, I pray to you, oh God, O my soul, who is the source of creativity, renewal, feistiness, and fetishism. As I pray, I name you my God, but a God only conceived in terms of a collectivity, as long as it means deliverance and liberation. A God so mine you can only belong to others. Like your/my/ our people, I can only pray to you in the plural, the plural of myself in them, and their polidoxy in me. For I can only count myself in the many, possessed that I am by the many winds of your Spirit, by the many living and nonliving creatures that I am woven with, and braided through the ancestries of the world and all the forms of lives of the earth. It is under this consciousness of this maddening “garment of mutuality” that I keep myself sane. My madness being one that can only be tamed by the plurality of people and the many spirits in me. So I pray, oh God, that no one ever casts away all the people who live in me. Without them I am silence, I am extinguished. These call centers are from the cú do mundo, thus it is filled with discardable people, those whose skin cannot bear worth, their souls have no value, those who have been vanished from the centers of power, those displaced and kept at a distance from the actual places where the services take place, those who now live in the shadows of our illuminated misery. These call centers are also sites where the earth calls your name groaning in pain. Can you hear them? Can you see the new turnings of the world recently, oh God, of the disenfranchised? A new bloodshed turn that unites nationalism, militarism, right wing religion, fascism, extractivism, and patriarchy is threatening to endanger us even more. They are pressing into the ongoing fragility of our own systems of self-sustenance: depression, isolation, fears, violence, alienation, addiction, panic, all countless forms of instability. One of its formal expressions have been the work of Yoram Hazony, who has proclaimed the new forms of “national community” and identities, where he refreshes the old moral loyalty to nation, family and propriety into more expanded ways of gripping the constitution of a nation with the structures of the self.4 4  He is after a form of free state where “a majority nation whose cultural dominance is plain and unquestioned, and against which resistance appears to be futile. Such a majority nation is strong enough not to fear challenges from national minorities, and so is able to grant them rights

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Oh God I hear the same things from your professed servant the neofascist president of Brazil, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, who wants the patriarchal ruling elites to continue to sustain the upper hand over minorities, who need to assimilate or be excluded. The ruling “nations” are the ones who set aside and control the off-shore centers of power and exploitation. They are scavengers of natural and human resources, depleting their means until exhaustion and then throwing them away. They are but patriarchal fascist movements after the use of law for their own fulfillment and the destruction of the women and children. Oh God, have you created us wired to capitalism so we can only understand and live in consumeristic ways? Is our brain malleable so we can adapt to our own destruction? Or is it the global capitalism that shapes our brain in ways that we cannot escape? Is the plasticity of our brain a form of adaptation to the systems, or is it flexibility that makes us submit to forms of power?5 I pray that our prayer practices can help us live in the Spirit of plasticity so we can engage into situations by saying NO to forms of capitalism that preclude life in all forms of detachment, of uneven forms of values and social economic distributions. But God of all and no disciplines. My vocation is also my malady. My own professional advancement depends on parochialism and self-regard. The weakness being the impossibility to have a conversation outside of the field, where other forms of knowledges must turn back to its own liturgical assurances and assessments. Prayers in books and altars away from the people. Our universal prayers praise you but do nothing for the real situations of real people. I wonder about the double side of our lips as we say our prayers: on the one side of our lips we say our litany of confessions in our worship services about the things we do and shouldn’t do, but on the other side of our lips we silence the litanies of injustices churches keep speaking on because of the neoliberal capitalism. Forgive me God for my wariness, but it is becoming increasingly more difficult to defend you. Or to defend you as I defend myself? Or to indict you as I also indict my own field? I don’t know, so I come to you. God of all the answers, help me here with some questions I have: are you on the and liberties without damaging the internal integrity of the state. For the most part, they therefore assimilate themselves into the system of expectations established by the constitutional and religious culture of the majority nation, learning its language and resorting to violence only on rare occasions.” Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (New York: Basic Books 2018), 165. 5  Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain? Foreword By Marc Jeannerod Translated By Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

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side of the good guys or the bad guys? My conundrum is this: I teach liturgy and I am supposed to teach the history, acts, gestures, thoughts, and modes of being a Christian by ways of the doings of the liturgy, something fundamental in every religion. I wonder if what I am teaching is nothing more than a nuanced source of reinforced coloniality, just another tool in the master’s toolbox. Am I fair to you when I say that a lot of the history of the church is filled with the smell of putrefied bodies killed and destroyed by your church in your name? Am I too harsh if I say that the church in Latin America was mostly a racist capitalist white supremacist catalyst for greed, arrogance, and defilement or that the white Christian churches in the US are literally nothing but a tail of the slavocrat, patriarchal, capitalistic elite? I confess for you already know it, my questions are forms of answers which are so difficult to move away without moving away from Yourself, the you I thought was always so near. If I am not making you mad or mothering you too much, I also wanted to press a little more and ask about worship books. Can we still use them? People say they have wisdom of the past and they can give us a trajectory of your movements in history. They say it is wonderful to continue to pray the same prayers your people have prayed for ages. They say these books come close to what the early church did. But let me confess this to you, oh God, from whom nothing is hidden. But I have my suspicions. Those books only carry the wisdom of some people especially from the Norte and we are supposed to repeat them like parrots as the universal Christian religion. And worse: that our authenticity as Christians can only be valid if we can recite the books and do exactly what the books tell us to do. Thus, the formula of my teaching, in order to have my student pass the exams of their churches is: I tell them “be the best parrots you can be,” if you can believe in it, even better! When I teach, I must acquire enough knowledge so I can continue speaking under your hallowed name. With all of that, I wonder, am I confessing the unholy expectation of the church, the necessary duplicity of my student’s religious tasks or my own complicity and lack of courage? For all of that I beg for forgiveness. Can the denominational books of prayers bring something good? Or are they pretty much psychoanalytical ways of organizing and comforting the souls of bodies drenched in capitalism? Prayers that do not do much beyond smoothing the path of class struggle. On the other hand, there are these new cool churches that avoid the liturgical books and are bound to the efficacy of their faith, making prayers an instrumentalization of the capitalistic society as they rush to become a subproduct of the neoliberal

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economic environment of our time. They pray mighty prayers, extemporaneously, and promise promises to enhance the empire of the individual, while destroying the ecosystems and basic commonalities. They are very different in their collective and individual approaches to you and to life, but they are exactly the same in their linings toward capitalism. I wonder where is the best way to pray to you? In churches where people bow down to patriarchal priests with pointy hats, liberal protestant churches that keep the same patriarchal structures or in new churches with cool horrendous liturgies and racist pastors? How do we Christians unlearn the prayer of greed and undo the desire for social ascension? How do we win our society that leads us not into temptation of full monetary indebtedness and emptiness? I wonder. When did the Christian faith became a high commodity, one shaped by colonialism and fully lived in the gospel proclaimed by suburban churches and lower class theologies of prosperities? When was it that we got so detached from the earth and incarnated a new real trinity described by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: “State the Father, Market the Son and Reason/Science the Holy Spirit.”6 This Trinitarian structure holds together the totality of the self that owns everything. As my friend Ken Sawyer, with whom I pray all the time, rightly said: “Self the Father, Self the Son and Self the Holy Spirit.”7 The off-shore prayer call places I am imagining calling to you from are filled with people whose lives are meaningless to many Self-Trinitarian Christians, whose only concern is to properly own their own lives. Once I heard that the devil is not your opposite, oh God, but your twisted one, the one who sneaks in and does the evil work in us without us perceiving its presence. And I wonder why were we never clever to see the work of the devil turning Christianity in general as a major driving force of colonialism and capitalism, with Protestantism being a major alliance with the Market. Why, since Jesus, very few Christians have been angry with the merchants, business people, and money changers. I assume that you might still be angry at this people, but what do you do when they own the church? Are you still part of this business entrepreneurial organization called church? Or have you been pushed out by your business partners, downsized or outsourced, no longer essential to the business model? 6  Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, A revolução faz o bom tempo https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CjbU1jO6rmE 7  Ken Sawyer, Professor of Church History, in reading and praying this text with me.

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Aren’t you frustrated that your announced kingdom of God has become this institution we call church? Surely there are some parts of this church that looks like you! It was because of the church that I got where I am now, so I can see real love happening. Once Prof. James Cone told me in a lunch that the church is a very small thing everywhere. From his old days, he told me: it is very hard to find the church, but it exists! You know too well, God, that since Constantine we have sold our soul to the powers that be. We have swum in the fullness of patriarchy and we still do. We became an empire and we continue to be. Your name has been spoken mostly in vain since that time, with exceptions when your name truly matters for the least of these. And then, oh God, since Reformation, Christianity has been fundamental to the very structure of expansion through colonization. Christianity became a modern western enterprise, an apparatus for the conquering machine of the west. During colonization, patriarchy kissed whiteness, fucked non-European people and gave birth to colonialism and all its racist murderous siblings. God have mercy on us for the (we the) devil won this battle! Since Reformation we learned to read the Bible differently. And we learned from our reformed leaders that a little bit of usury was not that bad, that crushing peasants was necessary in order to obey Princess and continue to be the church. Under your name, the church was sanctified with power and money, and use the people as resources for its wealth. By allying the Bible with the Middling classes, it served the elites, the Reformation churches Lost sight of the poor and forgot about your plans of justice and preferences for the poor. We Christians mirrored the Hebrew covenant between you and Abraham with a covenantal love with conquering Emperors! The Protestant churches became as the Catholics they had rebuked. With the holy crusades, we destroyed every enemy on the way, especially the Jews who had clearly betrayed us! The new covenant expanded and Protestant churches jumped on the wave of capitalism, helping the system to be organized, appeased, controlled, and appreciated. Churches boomed everywhere, missions went overseas, colonization took over the world, and Christian white supremacy flourished! It made sense to say “God is good all the time!” Please receive my litany of laments oh God. I lament that Calvin was in favor of a little usury. I lament that Luther supported the crushing of the peasants and bashed the Jews.

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I lament Christians provided capitalism with great theological thinking and normalized actions. I lament that the beginning of capitalism borrowed the doctrine of providence and the invisible hand of God to organize the understanding of the market that controlled everything. I lament that Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations,8 used the notion of your invisible hand as the invisible hand that organizes and controls the market. I lament that the capitalistic system learned to work on a profound faulty aspect of the human soul. I lament that what was supposed to be means of grace and love turned into the crushing of sinners, including the Jews and peasants in Europe. I lament that the doctrine of the total corruption/depravity helped to establish rules to monetary transactions. I lament the perverse thinking of Christians who saw us in such horrendous ways, even though we are both homo demens (delusional beings) and homo ludens (playful beings). I lament the ways in which the economic imagination used the delusional part of ourselves and the use of sin, moral limitation, and human brokenness as the conditions for capitalism to build its whole ground, where the renting system lends money to people, knowing that many of them will never be able to do it. I lament that the economic covenant now is made, hoping for profit and destruction. I lament that human “sin” became the place where economic greed meets human limitations, the crux of our own self-destruction, where human perversion becomes the axis that organizes the ways we live. I lament that many of us have lost our sense of awareness and enlightenment and are turning our species against its own self, where we need to attack or run away. I lament Reformation inaugurated a covenant between the Christian faith and the new emerging market and its political powers. This covenant lasted for a long time. The construction of the liberal market coincided with the growth of protestant Churches. These churches never condemned the economic market but instead, replicated the model of the market into its own structures.

8

 Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library 1994).

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I lament that the unquenchable desire of God became the ceaseless desire of desiring desire in things. I lament that even to this day, protestant churches mirror the market: a vast majority of small and medium churches disappearing and a few big rich churches thriving, a few pastors paid like CEOs, while the majority of pastors are struggling to make ends meet, endowments are more important than student’s debt, honoring rich people brings more money than honoring those working in places being dismantled by state abandonment and violence. As I lament, we don’t deny, oh God, that there has always been a faithful commitment between the Christian faith and the middle and upper classes in the United States, but we can no longer deny that the poor have been completely shut down and excluded from the conversation. But, God, everything comes to an end, and this very satisfactory covenant didn’t last. With the structure of the market going from liberal to neoliberal, capitalism broke its covenant with the Protestant and Catholic churches and affiliated itself with neo-pentecostal churches. We never thought that capitalism would break this sacred covenant but it did. Now Christian churches, seminaries, and institutions are at a loss because they don’t know how to survive. We have learned to trust wholeheartedly in the market and not in you, and now our faith keeps fluctuating with the market. Any Christian institution in the first world today depends fundamentally on budget not necessarily on faith. There is no Christianity without budgets. As we have had plenty of opportunities to see in history oh God, Capitalism as an autophagic system orients and adapts itself according to the most pressing opportunities. Once capitalism saw it didn’t need the official church anymore, that they didn’t have the importance on culture as Christians used to have, it started calling individual pastors to do the dirty job of teaching people to bow down to God by way of aligning themselves with corrupt systems with the promise that, if they teach their people that everything is only a matter of inner faith and that whatever they desire can be satisfied, they would be rewarded. In liberal capitalism, pastors are running out of jobs and churches closing, while denominations are still carrying loads of old money. Surely, they are still a part of the system and it doesn’t seem they will break with it. Liberal capitalism matches liberal theologies and protestant churches. The new theological needs of the neoliberal market is to organize itself around other forms of theology and the prosperity gospel, where You are the richest king ever, seems to be a great deal. Besides the eternal ­rehashing

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of old toothless liberal theologies, the neoliberal economic system matches new prosperity gospel churches in powerful ways. Among the chief differences, prosperity gospel churches will gain the money and make its own budget with the enrichment of pastors, while Protestant church pastors will have a specific salary, cash flow, and budget to keep and possibly an endowment to secure. While protestant churches don’t need to talk about desires because its members have the basics for life: house, car, school for their children, and healthcare, prosperity gospel churches must speak of desires and consumerism openly, aiming at going up in the social chain and get, depending on their social location, their first or second or third car. While protestant churches have members and have to keep up old buildings, prosperity gospel churches don’t have members and are always building newer and bigger buildings, which are a sign of their faith to God. The victims of the historical forms of capitalism and the current neoliberal system who are now in off-shore praying places have to cope with the precarization of their own lives, the necropolitics of state-nations, the increasing vulnerability of their lives, and a faith that engulfs them even back into this system of domination. Oh God, we could go on, but you know what happened to us! The cross of Jesus Christ was turned from a symbol of violence and humiliation into candies, strawberry lollipops sold in Christian stores. Which attests to the wonderful financial marketing potential for US Christians. In a nutshell, we Christian were able to entangle faith, money, whiteness, patriarchy, heterosexism, and class, and intertwined it all in many forms of perpetual racism. Nonetheless, the financial gain was quite good. We were able to build religious empires made of money, where Jesus Christ is used as its major patron. In US alone, religion is worth $1.2 trillion a year.9 A triumph for sure! I am just not sure if the triumph is yours, oh God, or it is ours and/or the Devil’s. This is the face of the Christian gospel and I wonder how you feel about it. That is why, God of the poor, my mind and my heart wonder toward those Christians who remain faithful, those who, James Cone said, are the real church of Jesus Christ, those who persist and hold on to the prophetic voice of Jesus and continue to resist here and there. The ones who carry a faith that is fully lived in precarious places around the earth, in poverty 9  US Religion Is Worth $1.2T/Year, More Than America’s 10 Biggest Tech Companies, Combined, http://the-atlantic.blogspot.ch/2018/04/us-religion-is-worth-12tyear-morethan.html?m=1

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stricken situations, in off-shore call center prayers, where people keep on calling your name. Now, oh God, my voice trembles and drifts away, my self divided and broken, not knowing how to organize myself in the face of so many conflicts and contradictions. But if you stay with me in the change of voice and tonality now, I must say this to you as if, and only as if, I am telling it to the world. There is coloniality everywhere in my faith. How do I go after the “coloniality of power”10 as proposed by Anibal Quijano through the intricacies of many grammars of faith and forms of living faithfully, oh God? How Christian religious formation, through songs, prayers, sermons, worship spaces, stories, and theologies, hold on to cosmologies and forms of living that can both liberate and oppress people? I wonder about how each of my senses, filled with coloniality, prevents me from fully saying Your name. Whose name I say when I say your name? Am I saying the name of the one who destroyed my people and stole their land? Are you, oh God, really good all the time? Besides my own grammar, coloniality holds sway over even my sense of home. Where do I belong? How can I be less schizophrenic in my living in such radical worlds within the Americas? Surely, I need to learn to be less Brazilian in the US and less of the US in Brazil. “Why do I do that?” is a constant question I have to answer, and I always freeze when this angry question is thrown at me, both in personal and institutional cases, often with threats me with proper consequences. My immigrant experiences are filled with contradictions, everlasting and impermanent feelings. When I think properly, I make my way around here, as I am also reminded I am from elsewhere. When I go to Brazil my own people remind me that I haven’t been there for a while and I now belong elsewhere. And then I hear this prayer from the chapter of our brother Luis N. Rivera-Pagán in this book11: Diaspora entails dislocation, displacement, but also a painful and complex process of forging new strategies to articulate cultural differences and identifications. In the Western cosmopolis, with its heterogeneous and ­frequently

10  Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1.3 (2000) 533–580, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/23906 11  Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, Towards a Decolonial Theology: Perspectives from the Caribbean.

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conflicting ethno cultural minorities that belie the mythical e pluribus unum, the émigré exists in ambivalent tension.

God, my prayer doesn’t have a ground. My dislocation is lodged in my soul and manifests itself in the awkward movements of my body and the over-showings of my emotions. Dislodged from a mythic place of fullness, my dislocation cannot be compared to the displacement of those who are truly scattered around the world today. Those removed from wars, running away from threats, living in refugee camps, trying to hang in there in the misplaced, forgotten off-shore call centers of prayers of our world. Where are you for these people, my God of love? These off-shore call centers of prayers are purposefully created in order to be hidden, forgotten. Call centers that fake care to help the affluent within the sterile world of finances and extort every single penny from middle-class people who want to survive and/or gain the best deals to go up the social latter.12 These off-shore call centers of prayers are also marked by a porous border and heavy militarization, turning immigrants into illegal, sick, and dangerous terrorists. God, did you see the caravans from Central America? Where do they belong? Their countries are filled with violence, and when they come to the US, mothers, tios, and ninos are threatened with military weapons. Oh God, where do immigrants belong? Do they belong to you? If belong means to be with, like the character of Coetzee’s Slow Man feels, I feel immigrants don’t belong anywhere, because the I of the immigrant is always detached from the we: “I am not the we of anyone.’”13  See the movie: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).  Coetzee, J.  M. Slow Man: A Novel (New York: Penguin Publishing Group), Kindle Edition, (179–180). ‘I had three doses of the immigrant experience, not just one, so it imprinted itself quite deeply. First when I was uprooted as a child and brought to Australia; then when I declared my independence and returned to France; then when I gave up on France and came back to Australia. Is this where I belong? I asked with each move. Is this my true home?’ ‘You went back to France – I forgot about that. One day you must tell me more about that period of your life. But what is the answer to your question? Is this your true home?’ She waves a hand in a gesture that encompasses not just the room in which they are sitting but also the city and, beyond that, the hills and mountains and deserts of the continent. He shrugs. ‘I have always found it a very English concept, home. Hearth and home, say the English. To them, home is the place where the fire burns in the hearth, where you come to warm yourself. The one place where you will not be left out in the cold. No, I am not warm here.’ He waves a hand in a gesture that imitates hers, parodies it. ‘I seem to be cold wherever I go. Is that not what you said of me: You cold man?’ The woman is silent. ‘Among the French, as you know, there is no home. Among the French to be at 12 13

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As we move around, sometimes we find the we of our I. It happened to me, when I was saved by a friend who said that we belong to the shalom of God. Whatever that means, it provided me an oikos. It also happened when I found in the nest of my wife and kids. And it also happens in my daily walk, with what I learned from Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh who prayed: at each step say: I have arrived. I am home. In the here. In the now. I am solid. I am free. In the ultimate I dwell.14

Nonetheless, all of these welcoming happenstances occurred to me because I was given an official document. I am legal God of all documents. For the reason of being a man, pass by a white guy, and mostly for not speaking in some places, I was accepted as a citizen. And now I wonder: how do I learn to belong to God’s shalom in the midst of my undocumented people? How do I get rid of the fear that my adoptive kids will be ashamed of my broken English and thick accent, or that I might eventually embarrass them just for being brown in US? How can I learn to always arrive at each step without confusion and separation? Or not speaking your name in vain? Oh God, I need your help, for I still feel that coloniality is at the heart of my prayer. As it owns my vocabulary, coloniality defines how I pray and behave, controlling my knees and my neck, holding up my jugular with its dirty hands just in case I move too much. Where do I go to find you, my God? The prayer books are a source of both peace and mostly utter foreignness. The hymn that I learned in my first years at my family’s Presbyterian church and I still sing gives me peace by its foreign ways. The author was a Scottish or British man named S. Baring-Gould and the title of the hymn Now The Day is Over.15 home is to be among ourselves, among our kind. I am not at home in France. Transparently not. I am not the we of anyone.’ 14  Thich Nhat Hanh, Breathe, You Are Alive: The Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2008), 114. 15  Now the day is over, The Lutheran Hymnal, Author: Sabine Baring-Gould, 1865, (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1941). Now the day is over, Night is drawing nigh, Shadows of the evening, Steal across the sky. Jesus, give the weary Calm and sweet repose; With Thy tend’rest blessing May our eyelids close Grant to little children Visions bright of Thee; Guard the

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So much a part of me, so much a radical otherness of me, in me, through such an unspoken acculturation/assimilation/liberation. If, as Augustine has taught us, singing is praying twice, does that mean that when I am singing my colonizer’s song I am being doubly colonized? Doubly defaced? Doubly deceived? Does that mean that the healing of this song in my heart and a sense of protection I always felt was doubly wrong? Was I improper in singing it, as Christianity was the language of those who taught me more than songs and prayers, but morals, ways of living, and all the while they stole everything from my people? How can I even say that if the church gave me everything I have and took me away from poverty? Should I get rid of these hymns and find a new song? What is in fact my own song? If this hymn is not mine, what song is? What makes something to be mine and something that is acculturation? How much is the “colonial Latino Christendom”16 the holder of all of the colonialities? How do we fight this? How do we learn what is mere parroting of somebody else’s power and to create and generate narratives of liberation and transformation for my own people, even if it comes from outside and it is mixed with the narratives of my own people? What are we to do with worship books and indigenous practices? Can I call Bob Marley’s Redemption song my main song, since I am not Jamaican and Rastafarian? Help us, oh God, to understand that there is no pure culture or essentialized races and that the isolation of groups and notions of race without expansive mutualities through diverse bodies are exactly what kills us. May Bob Marley become my elder and my guide so I can sing his song. As I move toward finishing this prayer, I might say that in spite of speaking too much, I have been tempted to go into aphasia. Especially when I hear about the endless destruction of blacks, indigenous, the poor, and the earth. Especially because this gospel is about love. But love is nowhere to be found. Then it becomes the code for domination, for nationalism, for domination and oppression. I love you so much I must turn you into something like me, or kill you for the sake of the world. Love decoded is read: coloniality. So much love in our world in service of the false gods! sailors tossing On the deep blue sea. Comfort ev’ry suff’rer Watching late in pain; Those who plan some evil From their sin restrain. When the morning wakens, Then may I arise Pure, and fresh, and sinless In Thy holy eyes. 16  Enrique Dussel, Epistemological Decolonization of Theology.

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Unless love becomes material gestures of transformation and acts of liberation, we are only using it for dominance. Unless love is the awareness of the killing of people and the destruction of the earth, love is nothing than a tool in the master tool box. As our brother Ignacio Ellacuría so vividly said: Those who make themselves deaf and blind, because they think that [the open wounds of injustice and suffering] is not a religious problem, these are the lukewarm that God, disgusted, has already vomited out of his mouth.17

Everything is taken by this colonial love. Even our dreams are colonized, oh God. Our unconscious has also been taken by forces of coloniality, and the coloniality of our dreams is tantamount to our current disaster. The size of our disaster is the size of the destruction of the earth. We can’t think or feel anything else besides our own desires for something else and our rights of entitlement. We can’t hear the earth groaning. We can’t adjust our lives to the limits and pace of the earth. We cannot have the earth orienting our processes. Development and progress are never to be challenged. Even our own sense of humanity is now deeply attached to our own ability to develop and progress. If we don’t always produce something that results in progress or efficiency, we are not living up to our full potential. The result is that we become more detached from the earth, eating poisonous food, becoming sicker, anxious, and depressed. God, in these times of accrued instability and insecurity, we can’t start our spirituality in you if your name entails a separation between heaven and earth, a transcendence/immanence duality. We must start listening to the voices of earth by listening to those who listen to the earth. Sylvia Marcos reminds us of a movement of Mesoamerican Women offering a mutuality of relations, complementarities and intersectionalities as fundamental to indigenous forms of spiritualities. She prays: As Comandanta Esther insisted in her address to the Mexican Congress, complementarity embraces everything in nature. She explained that earth is life, is nature, and we are all part of it. This simple phrase expresses the interconnectedness of all beings in the Mesoamerican cosmos. Beings are not separable from one another. This principle engenders a very particular form of human collectivity with little tendency to individuation. This sense of 17  Ignacio Ellacuría, Escritos teológicos, tomo II (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 2000), 135.

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connectedness has been found consistently within contemporary indigenous medical systems and also in the first historical primary sources. The “I” cannot be abstracted from its surroundings. There is a permanent transit between the inside and the outside… The international indigenous movements… acknowledge the damage that diverse colonialisms have done to their worldviews and have begun to echo one another concerning the value of recovering their own spiritualities and cosmologies.18

How can we make the I become a we, oh God? Our We is way too much enthused with our own selves and our own noises. We don’t listen to the birds, we can’t hear the water, we don’t pause to the sounds of the earth. The coloniality of the white academic scholarship has rendered it stupid to relate to the earth that way. God of our lives, help us, the we, perform other forms of prayers. Prayers/performances that haunt back the site of the oppressor. May these off-shore call centers be a double sign of the vengeance: of the poor who will sooner or later join us as we invade the boundaries of white gentrified supremacists zip codes; of the earth who will get rid of us at the right time. Surely these call centers will be changed as to pray and to pronounce your name. The faithful ones from everywhere among the poor will remind us of the possibility of the gospel of Jesus Christ! I feel the Spirit nudging me for a good word here before I end my prayer. So I am reminded of Howard Thurman who said: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”19 And I finish also being reminded of the wisdom that admonishes ourselves to plant trees we will never see, but our grandchildren will rest under their shadows. May this prayer oh God, help us engage with the Memory of the Fire. As our brother, Eduardo Galeano prayed:

18  Sylvia Marcos, Mesoamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality. Decolonizing Religious Beliefs. 19  As quoted in Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled (Spring Valley: Crossroad Publishing Cop., 1996), xv.

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I believe in memory not as a place of arrival, but as point of departure—a catapult throwing you into present times, allowing you to imagine the future instead of accepting it.20

I am sorry I spoke so much. Forgive me, oh God, for my being so defused, in not addressing one thing wholeheartedly, in letting my mind follow the wanderings of my heart, the heaviness of my inconsistencies. If I pray is because I hope this prayer can be received by you and encompassed within the multitude of your mercy. Merciful One, I beg for mercy! I pray in the trust of what Scripture says: glide Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.21

In the name of the we-refugee-undocumented-immigrant-lynched Jesus Christ, whose life was killed by the State sanctified violence for all of the call centers of this world, I pray.

20  Galeano, Eduardo. The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind (New York: Open Road Media, 2014), Kindle Locations 1379–1380z. 21  Romans 8:26–27, Holy Bible, NRSV.

Index1

A Abraham, 55, 277 Achebe, Chinua, 50, 57n56, 253 Acosta, José de, 57, 58 Adorno, Theodor, 35 African theology, 41 Afro-Brazilian community, see Afro-­Brazilian population Afro-Brazilian population, 20, 255, 262, 263 Afro-Latin American diaspora, 184 Alcoff, Linda, 39 Altepetl, 101, 102, 107, 109, 110, 113n16, 120 Althaus-Reid, Marcella, 18, 183, 194–202, 227 Alvarado, Pedro de, 149 Alves, Rubem, 231 Amanteca (native feather artists), 122, 122n45

Amantecayotl (indigenous feather art), 121 Anzaldua, Gloria, 4, 52, 53, 196 Apel, Karl-Otto, 36 Appiah, Anthony Kwame, 170 Armstrong, Karen, 59 Asian theology, 41 Assmann, Hugo, 227 Aubry, Andrés, 133n5 Augustine, 284 Aurelius, Marcus, 172 Axis mundi, 101, 102, 120 Aztlán, 17, 147, 148, 148n2, 156 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 53 Balasuriya, Tissa, 41 Bales, Kevin, 49 Barbados Declaration, the, 132, 133

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 R. Barreto, R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7

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INDEX

Barbé, Dominique, 250 Baring-Gould, Sabine, 283, 283n15 Base communities pastoral method, 243, 246, 248, 249, 251 Salvadoran, 19, 243–246, 253 See also Comunidades eclesiales de base (CEBs); Ecclesial base communities Bauman, Zygmunt, 49 Beck, Ulrich, 167, 170 Benhabib, Seyla, 170 Benjamin, Walter, 27, 35, 271 Bethge, Eberhard, 61 Bhabha, Homi, 44, 47, 48, 50, 57, 218n1, 220 Bible, the, 51, 54, 55, 60, 244, 277 Black consciousness, 262–264, 266 Boer, Roland, 54 Boff, Clodovis, 230, 248 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 60 Border thinking, 11, 11n27, 48, 52, 112, 221 Boulaga, F. Eboussei, 40 Bowe, John, 49 Brazil, 20, 33, 37, 57n55, 189, 202n60, 249n19, 255–257, 262–264, 266, 274, 281 British North America Act (BNAA) of 1867, the, 151 Buell, Denise, 173 Butler, Judith, 74, 74n23, 175n34, 207, 209 Byzantine Empire, the, 29 C Canada, 10, 15, 17, 65n4, 103, 147, 148, 148n2, 149n4, 151–153, 156–162, 159n29 Capillas posas, 120 Capitalism, 4, 25, 35, 37, 42, 181, 190, 199, 219, 274–280

Cardijn, Joseph, Fr., 247 Caribbean, the, 1, 8, 9n23, 13n29, 14, 21n30, 31, 58, 171, 184, 188, 189, 208 Carrasco, David, 101, 102 Casaldáliga, Pedro (Bishop), 20, 255 Castilianization (Castellanización), 152 Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de, 276 Castro-Gómez, Santiago, 39 Catholic Church, the, 116, 124, 136, 139, 155, 204, 214, 262, 279 Catholicism, 17, 63, 67, 118, 124, 130n1, 155, 246, 251n24, 260 Cechin, Antônio, 258, 259 CELAM, 132, 133, 155 Cesar-like papacy, 29 Chilam Balam, 161 Chin, Tamara, 174 China, 30, 30n8, 31, 35n17, 37, 38n24, 271 Christ, the, 26, 27, 32, 122, 138, 155, 209 Christendom (Cristiandad, Christlichkeit, Chretienté) colonized, 13, 33, 195, 214 imperial, 14, 16, 18, 32, 92, 93, 104, 169 Latino, 29, 33, 284 Latino-Germanic, 13, 29–31, 33, 34, 39, 41, 42 metropolitan, 30–34, 37, 39, 41, 42 “universalization” of, 12, 34 Christian conversion, 92, 93 Christianity(ies) American, 97 colonial, 9, 11, 12, 17, 129–145 indigenous, 17, 93, 95, 97, 107–124 messianic, 12, 28, 30, 32, 33, 42 Nahuatilization of, 16, 110 Christianization, 58, 93, 110, 111, 113, 121, 149, 150, 184

 INDEX 

Christian proliferation, see Proliferation of Christianity Christians, the second class, 33, 111 Christian theology, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13–15, 83, 124, 136, 142, 143, 195, 198, 200, 206, 218, 232, 243 Christmas, 28, 33, 34, 138 Chrysostom, John, 29 Civic solidarity, 204 Civilization(s), 4n12, 29, 33, 35, 44, 46, 58, 84, 141, 149, 151, 156, 190, 258, 260, 270 clash of, 52 Clendinnen, Inga, 104 Cliff, Michelle, 49 Cofradías, 124 Colonial Christianity (see Colonial Christians) discourse, 14, 44, 45, 50, 181, 248 encounter, 169, 174 ideology, 44, 169 racist theology, 185 subjectivity, 12, 13, 32, 40, 94 Colonial Christians, 11 Colonialism, 2, 4, 4n12, 5, 7, 9, 11, 16, 20, 33, 35, 55, 86, 87, 168, 168n6, 171, 189, 195, 202, 217, 250, 257, 258, 276, 277, 286 European, 55, 65n4, 68, 148 Coloniality of being, 5, 219, 220, 229 epistemic, 143, 212 of knowledge, 5, 219–221, 246 of power, 3n6, 5, 20, 25, 38, 130, 130n1, 144, 149n4, 187, 189, 198, 219, 220, 281 Colonization, 17, 57, 65n4, 67, 70, 130n1, 131–133, 141, 148–150, 156, 158, 162, 184, 190–192, 197, 198, 212, 251, 255, 257, 258, 277 Columbus, Christopher, 31, 43, 45, 112n15, 148

291

Commission for Historical Clarification/National Reconciliation Commission, the (CEH/CNR), 147, 153, 153n14, 156 Complementarity, 72, 79, 85, 285 Comunidades eclesiales de base (CEBs), 19, 243–246, 243n3, 248–254, 249n19 Congar, Yves, 40 Conrad, Joseph, 50 Constantine, 27, 173, 277 Constantinople, 29 Contraconquista, 95, 95n7 Conventos (mendicant evangelization complexes), 114, 119n34, 120, 120n37, 121 Coplas, Martín, 259, 259n14 Coppola, Franco (archbishop), 213 Cortés, Hernando, 93, 108n5, 112, 112n15, 113, 113n16, 113n18, 114n21 Cosmopolitan discourse, 167, 170, 172, 175 hospitality, 170, 177 identity, 168, 173, 182 modern cosmopolitan discourse, 172 Cosmopolitanism Black Cosmopolitanism, 171 Christian, 173 contemporary, 167, 168, 168n6, 170–172, 177, 181 Diogenes’s, 172–174, 181 imperial, 173, 180, 181 Kantian, 170 modern, 17, 169, 172, 177 negative, 169, 172, 173, 178–181 Philo’s, 173 reinvention of, 175 Stoic notion of, 172 Criollo, 114 Critical frontier positioning, 222 Crusades, the, 30, 116, 277

292 

INDEX

Cuba, 32, 44, 44n2, 57n55, 112, 202 Cuellar, Guillermo, 242 Culture(s), 4, 5, 8, 9n25, 11–13, 15, 19, 28, 29, 33–35, 37, 39–42, 42n32, 46n17, 48, 52, 53, 65–67, 65n4, 69–71, 74–77, 77n30, 79, 83–85, 93, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 121, 121n41, 123, 123n49, 124, 132–134, 139, 140, 142, 147, 149n4, 151–155, 159, 159n26, 171, 184, 193, 194, 198, 208, 245, 256, 258, 261, 262, 264, 274n4, 279, 284 clash of cultures, 52 Cunningham, Myrna, 64 D Declaration of Barbados for the Liberation of the Indians, the, see Barbados Declaration, the Decolonial Christian faith, 244, 248, 254 history(ies), 10, 91–105, 131 impetus, 148, 156–162 theology(ies), 142, 144, 249 thinking, 8n22, 13, 14, 158, 161 Decolonial turn, see Decolonial-turn theory Decolonial-turn theory, 2n5, 3–6, 3n6, 10, 15, 19, 36–39, 142, 142n29, 144, 145, 184, 218, 218n1, 219, 223 Decoloniality, 3, 5, 11n27, 20, 144n33, 190, 198, 241n1, 243, 245n7, 253, 253n28, 254 Decolonization epistemic, 4, 13, 14, 143, 214, 229, 233 epistemological, 10, 12, 25–42, 74, 144, 148, 214, 225, 246, 253

of epistemology, 19, 74–75, 241–254 Decolonizing epistemology, 19, 74–75, 130n1, 185, 219–224, 232 theologies, 6, 12, 25–42, 134, 144, 189, 194, 249 theories, 4, 6, 7, 13, 131, 135 Dehumanization, 18, 169, 178, 180, 181 Dependency Theory, 38 Diakonía, 246 Diaspora(s), 14, 15, 26, 46–53, 183–202, 204, 207, 209, 215, 281 Diasporic communities, 48, 49 displacement, 14, 47, 48, 185, 281 existence, 48, 53 Dichotomy between public and private space, the, see Private and public space Diogenes the Cynic, 172 Diplomacy, 43 Discrimination, 18, 64n2, 64n3, 140, 152n12, 162, 204–206, 255 Dislocation, 14, 47, 49, 51, 52, 223, 281, 282 Displacement, 14, 47, 48, 51, 152, 154, 155, 174, 185, 281, 282 Double consciousness, 14, 52, 112 Du Bois, W.E.B., 52, 171 Duality, 72, 75–82, 285 Dube, Musa, 54, 54n46 Dussel, Enrique, 5, 8n22, 11–14, 13n29, 21, 58, 94, 111, 112, 130n1, 144, 148, 161, 168, 184, 188, 190, 245, 249 E Ecclesial base communities, 19, 241–254 Eco-feminism, 83 Ecofeminist, 63, 83 theology, 83

 INDEX 

Egalitarian marriage, 203–206, 213, 215 Ego conquiro, 148 Ellacuría, Ignacio, 228, 285 El Memorial de Sololá, 161 El Salvador’s Civil War, 251n24, 252 Emigré, 44, 47, 48, 58, 282 Empire, 9–12, 18, 26–29, 32–34, 44, 46, 49, 50, 54, 55, 57, 59, 92, 112, 149n4, 171–174, 182, 184, 186, 221, 258, 260, 276, 277 Enlightenment, the, 35, 37, 40, 57 Eología india maya cristiana, 135 Episcopal Commission for Indigenous (Comisión Episcopal de Indígenas), 71 Epistemic disobedience, 4, 5, 158 Epistemological de-colonizing of theology, 32, 94, 249 Epistemology decolonial, 3, 19, 219–225, 232, 241–254 of the heart, 143 Latin American Liberation Theology, 219, 224–226, 232 of the poor, 197, 198 “privileging of,” 74 Equilibrium, 69, 72, 80–82, 86, 178 Esther, 55, 68, 69, 85, 86, 285 Ethnoracialization, 156 Eurocentric theology, 41 Eurocentrism, 13, 35–37, 39, 41 Europe, 12, 25, 26, 30, 31, 35, 37, 40, 161, 169, 174, 175, 177, 178, 181, 192, 247, 271, 278 Evangelicalism, 155 Evangelicals, 73, 155, 155n19, 204, 224 Evangelization, 9, 42n32, 72, 93, 110, 113, 114, 114n21, 115n25, 120, 130, 131, 139, 150, 153, 155, 257 Exile, 14, 26, 47, 48, 51, 174

293

F Fanon, Franz, 4, 18, 26, 39, 44, 47, 59, 169, 171, 178–182 Feminicides, 213 Feminism, 66, 74, 80 Feminist, 15, 25, 63, 64n3, 66, 73–75, 74n21, 75n24, 79, 80, 83, 86, 87, 198, 201, 205, 206, 232 theology in Latin America, 185, 195 Fernández, David, 204, 214 First Indigenous Congress in San Cristóbal, the, 138 First Indigenous Women’s Summit of the Americas, the, 265 First Nations, the, see Métis and Inuit Fiscal, 123 Franciscans, the, 107, 110n9, 113, 114 Freedom, 17, 27, 48n22, 130, 135, 140, 167–169, 175, 176, 178, 180, 181, 205, 242, 261 Fundação Centro de Educação Comunitária e Social do Nordeste, the (CECOSNE), 263 G Gabriel, Calixta, 64, 107 Gante, Pedro de, 114, 114n20 Gebara, Ivone, 227 Gender duality, 77–80 equity, 80–82 and sexuality, 6, 19, 184, 188, 190, 216 Geopolitical power, 55 Gibson, Mel, 55 Girardi, Juan José, 153, 153n14 Globalization, 65, 167–171, 198 God of the armies, the, 27 of Christendom, the, 28 Liberator (see The liberating God)

294 

INDEX

God (cont.) of the oppressors, 28 of the poor, 11, 225, 242, 244, 248, 280 the presence of God, 142 Yahweh the Liberator, 51 Goim, the, 26 Gómez, Alicia, 142 Gordon, Lewis, 38, 39 Gradual Civilization Act of 1857, the, 151 Gradual Enfranchisement Act in 1869, the, 151 Greco-Roman culture, the, 28 Greene, Graham, 47 Guarani people, 258, 260 Guatemala, 17, 68, 136, 147–151, 149n4, 149n5, 152n12, 153, 153n14, 155, 155n19, 157–159, 161, 162 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 224, 230 Gutiérrez Jiménez, Pedro, 141, 142n27, 143 H Habermas, Jurgen, 170, 206 Hanke, Lewis, 58 Harper, Stephen, 159 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 35, 37, 179 Hegemony, geopolitical, 14, 27, 45, 49, 54, 55, 204, 207, 222, 248, 251, 252, 254 Hélder Câmara, Dom, Archbishop, 262 Hellenic-Roman Empire, the, 27 Hermeneutic ontology, the, 228 Hernández Martínzez, Maximiliano, 251 Heteroglossia, 52 Heteronormativity, 191, 203–216 Hinkelammert, Franz, 227 Hobsbawm, Eric, 44, 60 Holland, 31, 33, 35

Holy Sepulcher, the, 30 Homophobia, 196, 204, 205 Homosexuality, 203–205, 213, 214 Horkheimer, Max, 35 Horsley, Richard, 54 Humanism, 169, 179–181 Humanity, 4, 18, 35, 37, 46, 116, 153n14, 156, 169, 174–181, 175n32, 184, 231, 257, 265, 285 Human rights, 48, 65, 72, 149n5, 188, 204, 205, 251n24 Human sexuality, 200 Hume, David, 60 Huntington, Samuel P., 52 I Iberian Catholicism, 118 Iberian invasion, 118, 120, 124 Iberians, 112, 113n16, 114, 116, 184, 187 Identity Christic identity, 210 cosmopolitan, 173, 182 personal, 207–209 religious, 51, 171, 232 Ideology(ies) colonial, 14, 44, 56, 169 of race, the, 186 Iglesia, 13, 17, 60n72, 70n14, 72n18, 108n2 Iglesia autóctona, 17, 129–145 Imperial Christendom, 12, 32, 33 Christianity, 17, 92, 169 conquest, 4, 54 hegemony, 54, 248, 251, 252 power, 45, 174 Incan Empire, the, 34 Incas, the, 25, 34 Indecency, 187, 197–199, 201 theology, 18, 183, 195, 197–199, 201

 INDEX 

Indigenous Christianities, 7, 7n21, 16, 17, 107–124 communities, 3, 16, 17, 21, 65, 65n4, 72, 79, 82, 93–95, 94n4, 102, 104, 105, 110, 111, 115, 118, 136, 140, 141, 147, 155n19, 157, 159, 161, 162, 254, 257, 261 cosmovision, 78, 80, 84 Mexican women, 70 movements, 15, 64n2, 65n4, 70, 80, 86, 135, 144, 286 Pan-indigenous collective subject, 66, 68 rebellion, 129, 137 resistance movements, 129, 136n12 spirituality(ies), 3n6, 15, 63–87, 93, 104, 155n18, 265, 286n18 (see also under Spirituality) women, 15, 18, 63–73, 64n3, 68n10, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82–87, 130n1, 187, 190, 195, 196, 265 Indigenous-authored maps, 97 Indigenous women’s movement, the, 64, 66 Ingram, James, 171 Inquisition, the, 191, 192 Interconnectedness, 85–87, 285 Intercultural dialogue, see Intercultural theological dialogue Intercultural theological dialogue, 4, 136, 142, 143 Iribarren, Pablo, 140, 141, 141n26 Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria, 7n19, 38n22, 195 Isherwood, Lisa, 225, 232 Islam, 29, 116 Islamic kingdoms, the, 30

295

J Jesus, see Jesus Christ Jesus Christ, 12, 28, 55, 59, 104, 201, 211, 248, 276, 280, 283n15, 286, 287 Jiménez de Cisneros, Francisco, 116 Jocón, Maria Estela, 74, 79 Joh, Wonhee Anne, 55, 56n51 Jorge Vehlo, Domingos, 263 Joyce, James, 50, 50n33 Judith, 55, 74, 173, 173n25, 175n34, 207 K Kaiyogan, Richard, 154 Keller, Catherine, 55, 55n50, 56n51, 83n46, 231 Kieerkegard, Søren, 28 Koinonia, 210, 258n11, 263n37 Kosmios (Universian: man of the universe), 172 L Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 17, 32, 57, 57n55, 58, 58n59, 58n62, 59n63, 92, 129, 133, 133n5, 136–137n14, 137n15, 138, 142n27, 174–176 Latin America, 1n1, 2, 4n12, 7, 7n21, 8, 12, 14–16, 18, 21, 31, 37, 40n28, 42, 45n9, 57n55, 58, 65n4, 67, 92, 94, 95, 97n13, 97n14, 104, 105, 110n10, 124, 130n1, 132, 132n3, 138, 139, 183–186, 185n6, 188–192, 194–196, 198, 200–202, 208, 217, 220, 222, 233, 244, 245, 248n14, 249n19, 251, 275, 281n10

296 

INDEX

Latin America bishops’ conference in Medellín, the, see CELAM; Latin American Episcopal Conference, the Latin American Episcopal Conference, the, 132, 155 Latin American liberation theology (LALT), 8n22, 13, 19, 41, 219–224 epistemology, 219–226, 232 method, 194, 224–227 See also Liberation theologies Latina/o theologians, 17, 162–163 Latina/o theology, 7, 7n19, 17, 38n22, 162, 163 Latin Empire, the, 29 Latino-Germanic religion, the, 29 Laugerud García, Kjell Eugenio, 152, 152n12 Leibsohn, Dana, 97, 97n14, 98, 98n15, 98n18 Lenkesdorf, Carlos, 85, 85n54 Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, transvestite or intersexual, see LGBTTTI Levinas, Emmanuel, 27, 37–38 Lezama Lima, Jose, 95, 95n7 LGBTTTI, 204, 207, 209, 212, 213, 215, 216 LGBTTTI communities, see LGBTTTI populations LGBTTTI populations, 213 The liberating God, 225 Liberation, 2, 7, 8n22, 11–13, 19, 25, 26, 37, 38, 46, 47, 59, 61, 63, 130n1, 132, 133, 141, 179, 180, 183, 188, 194, 195, 197–201, 206, 207, 242, 244–248, 252, 253n28, 259, 260, 263, 273, 284, 285 Liberation theologies, see Latin American liberation theology; Theology of liberation

Liew, Tat-Siong Benny, 54 Linguistic turn, 36 Liturgia, 246 Liturgies of repentance, 20, 255–266 Lockhart, James, 102, 102n27, 109n7, 112, 112n14, 118n29 Lo cotidiano, 195 Locus enunciationis (the place from which we speak), 162 Locus theologicus (the place where we do theology), 162, 206 Logos, 230, 231 Lopez, Alma, 79 Lopez Austin, Alfredo, 76, 76n28, 78n33 López de Gómara, Francisco, 113n18 Lubac, Henri de, 40 Lucas García, Fernando Romeo, 152, 152n12 Lugones, María, 4, 5n14, 39 Luther, Martin, 31n11, 32, 159n27, 277 M Machiavelli, Niccolò di Bernardo dei, 32 Madrigal Sánchez, Víctor, 132, 133, 142 Maestros de capilla (chapel choirmasters), 123 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 2n5, 3n7, 5, 5n14, 5n16, 6, 8, 9n23, 38, 224, 229, 246, 246n10 Manifest destiny, 44, 44n5 Mapa of Cuauhtinchan II, the, 101 Mapa of Teozacoalco, see the Teozacoalco map Mapas, the, 96–98, 97n13, 98n17, 100, 102, 103, 105 Maps of the Relaciones geográfricas, 96 Marcos, Sylvia, 15, 21, 65n3, 68n10, 74n22, 75n26, 76n27, 78n34, 111, 130n1, 155n18, 160, 184, 196, 254, 265, 265n45, 285, 286n18

 INDEX 

Mariátegui, José Carlos, 26, 45n9 Martellus, Henricus, 31 Martyrs, 242, 251–253, 252n24, 258 Marx, Karl, 28, 171 Marxism, 37, 41, 46n15, 218n1, 227, 228, 253n28 Massacres, 251, 252 Mass of St. Gregory, the, 121 Mayan communities in Guatemala, the, 17, 162 Mayan peoples, 152, 159 pan-Mayan collective identity, 68 Mayas, the, 3n6, 25, 153n14, 158 Mbembe, Achille, 178 McKinley, William, 44 Mega cities, 50, 53 Memmi, Albert, 44, 44n8 Menchú, Rigoberta, 64, 64n3, 69n12, 71, 82 Mendieta, Eduardo, 7n19, 37, 38n22, 39 Mendieta, Jerónimo de, 93 Mesoamerica, 75n26, 76n27, 117 Mesoamerican community, 75 peoples, 117–119 region, 76 religion, 117–119 spiritual traditions, 84 women, 15, 63–87, 265, 285 Messianic Christianity (cristianismo, Christendum, Christianisme), 12, 26–28, 30, 32, 33, 42 Messianic/messianic, the, 12, 26–30, 32, 33, 42, 42n32 principle, 29 sect, 27 Messianism, 27, 28 Mestiza, 5n14, 50, 53n45, 193 Mestizo, 72, 73, 114 Métis and Inuit, 17, 151, 153, 156, 158, 159, 162 Mexica, the, 110, 113, 117

297

Mexico Cholula, 107, 108, 108n5 diocese San Cristóbal, the, 131 Mexico City, 109n7, 113, 114, 114n20, 114n21, 122, 122n45, 141n26, 203, 204, 212, 213, 216 San Pedro Cholula, 107 Tenochtitlan, 109n7, 113, 123n48 Mignolo, Walter, 4, 4n9, 4n12, 5n14, 11n27, 26n1, 39, 44, 44n7, 48, 48n24, 52, 58, 58n61, 64n1, 74n22, 158n24, 188, 218n1, 221, 222, 245, 245n7, 248n14, 253n28 Migration and diaspora, 14, 15, 46–53 Missa da terra sem males, the, 255, 258, 262–266 Missa dos Quilombos, 255, 262–266 Moctezuma, 113 Modernity, 2n5, 5, 5n14, 6, 8, 9, 12, 13, 32, 34–37, 42, 49n29, 58, 67–70, 92, 130n1, 144, 158, 161, 169, 171, 174, 177, 178, 181, 184, 190, 219, 248n14 Moltmann, Jürgen, 40 Moore, Stephen D., 54, 54n46, 56n52 Motolinía, Toribio Benavente, 118, 118n31 Mulatta, 187, 188, 193 Mundy, Barbara E., 96n8, 98n17 Muslims, 26, 29–31, 171, 188, 192, 209 N Nahuas, 16, 107–124 Naipaul, V. S., 45 Nascimento, Milton, 263 National Family Front, the (Frente Nacional de la Familia/FNF), 205, 212 Native Americans, the, 57, 58, 77n30, 103, 196

298 

INDEX

Natural law, 177, 212 Negritude movement, the, 179 Neocolonialism, 17, 169 New Spain, 94, 95, 103, 104, 107, 108, 111, 111n13, 113–116, 114n19, 114n20, 115n25, 118, 121n41, 122 New Testament, the, 51, 189, 210 New World, the, 12, 20, 31, 97n12, 112, 113n18, 113–114n19, 114, 114n21, 116, 116n26, 118, 120, 121n42, 134, 140, 148n2, 174, 184, 231, 257, 272 Nhat Hanh, Thich, 283 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg), 36 Nwankwo, Ifeoma, 171 O Olmedo, Bartolomé de, 112 Oppression, 11, 13, 59, 60, 72, 132, 140, 156, 157, 198, 201, 216, 219, 227, 232, 233, 244, 247, 249, 252, 253, 256, 271, 284 Orbis Christianus (The Christian Cosmos), 170 Ortiz, Fernando, 52, 252 Ottoman Empire, the, 29 P Pagden, Anthony, 58, 58n62, 112n15 Palmares and Zumbi, 262 Pantokrator, 27 Papal Bulls, 32, 113n19, 116 Paris, 35n17, 44, 44n2, 48 Pastoral indígena, 133 Patriarchy, 212, 214, 273, 277, 280 Paul of Tarsus, 210 Pax americana, 44 Peña Nieto, Enrique, 203, 213 Pentecostalism, 155

Pentecostals, 155 Perdue, Leo G., 54, 54n46 Peregrina, 253–254 Perichoresis, 210 Perkins, Judith, 173 Philo, 173 Pires, José Maria (Archbishop), 263, 266 Poma de Ayala, Guamán, 32 Pope Benedict XVI, 51 Pope Francis, 144, 145 Popol Vuh, the, 161 Porto Rico, 46 Portugal, 30, 31, 33, 37, 174, 258 Posa chapels, 120, 121 Postcolonial colony, 14, 46 criticism, 55, 218n1 critique, 44, 58 cultural studies, 15, 25, 47, 51, 56 defiance, 15, 50, 57 theories, 61, 168, 218, 218n1 Postcolonialism, 7n18, 25 Postmodernism, 25 Poverty, 41, 49n31, 109n6, 118, 132, 140, 152n12, 199, 201, 243n3, 244, 245, 257, 264, 280, 284 Pragmatic turn, 36 Prakash, Gyan, 221 Principle of fluid duality, 77 Private and public space, 205 Profecía, 246 Proliferation of Christianity, 94 Puerto Ricans, 14, 46, 46n17, 48n22, 52, 112, 185 Puerto Rico, 10, 14, 43–45, 44n2, 52, 57n55, 189 Q Queer political theology, 18, 206, 214 theology, 201, 206, 207, 209–211

 INDEX 

theology of liberation, 201 theory, 206–209, 214 Quiché, 153, 158, 159n26 Quijano, Anibal, 4n12, 20, 26, 38, 45, 130n1, 149n4, 187–189, 219, 220, 248, 281 Quilombos, 255, 262–265 R Race and coloniality, 188 Race and gender, 25, 179, 183, 190 Race and sex, 190 Racial democracy, 194 Racialization, 175n32, 190, 198, 200, 220 Racism, 4, 13, 162, 188, 189, 280 internalized racism, 185 Rahner, Karl, 40 Rape, 190–192, 201 Reconciliation, 7, 17, 160–161 Reconquista mentality, 116 Reconquista, the, 116 Re-evangelization, 155 Religion, 3n6, 4, 6, 8n22, 9, 11, 16, 18, 21, 28, 29, 33–35, 39–41, 42n32, 45, 56, 63, 70, 70n14, 72, 72n19, 93–95, 101, 104, 105, 111n13, 136, 139, 147, 169, 171, 173, 176, 183, 184, 192, 199, 204–206, 209, 213, 218, 256, 273, 275, 280 Religious empires, 280 identity, 51, 232 marriage, 214 Residential schools, 147, 150, 150n6, 151, 153, 154, 156 Ricard, Robert, 93n3, 113n19, 115, 118n30, 122n47 Rieger, Joerg, 55, 56n51, 59n63 Rios Montt, Efraín, 154, 155n20 Rito Penitencial, 264

299

Rivera Carrera, Norberto, Cardinal, 212, 213 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia, 156, 156n22 Rivera, Mayra, 55, 55n50, 56n51 Rivera-Pagán, Luis N., 14, 15, 21, 49n27, 57n55, 59n63, 59n64, 112, 160, 168, 169, 184, 185, 189, 225, 248, 248n15, 253, 253n27, 281, 281n11 Roman Catholic Church, the, 20, 121n42, 129, 132, 144, 244, 255, 265 Roman Empire, the, 27, 32, 54, 173 Romero, Oscar (Archbishop), 252 Ruiz, Samuel (Bishop), 133, 134n9, 138, 138n18, 138n19, 140, 142n28 S Sacristanes (sacristans), 123 Sahagún, Bernardino de, 123, 123n49 Said, Edward, 38n23, 44, 44n7, 45n10, 46, 46n15, 51n40, 57, 61, 61n74, 220 Saint Paul, 114n21, 209 Sánchez, Madrigal, 132, 133, 133n6, 133n7, 142n30 Santiago, Jorge, 133, 133n5, 135n11 Sartre, J. P., 40 Schweiker, William, 53, 53n44 Second Vatican Council, see Vatican II, the Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 207 See-judge-act method, the, 247–250 Segovia, Fernando, 54, 54n46, 56, 56n52, 58, 169 Self-determination, 74, 130, 135, 137, 144, 157, 160, 258 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 33, 57, 58, 175, 176, 176n35 Sexual diversity, 18, 19, 204–206, 208, 213

300 

INDEX

Sexuality, 18, 55, 183–202, 207, 227, 228 of the African and indigenous and mixed peoples, the, 191, 192 Sexual theologians, 199, 201 Sheller, Mimi, 188, 189 Simpson, Audra, 103, 103n33 Slaves, 26, 27, 55, 57n55, 172, 175, 179, 181, 187, 188, 191, 209, 262, 264, 265 Slave trade, 38, 58, 262 Smith, Adam, 30, 278, 278n8 Solari, Amara, 100, 100n21, 101n24 Spaniards, the, 45, 94, 109, 112n15, 113, 176 Spanish colony, 44 Spanish empire, the, 43 Spirituality of collectivity, 66, 68, 71, 73, 85–87 of immanence, 82–84, 285 indigenous peoples, 64n2, 66, 67, 67n6, 69–73, 72n17, 78, 80, 85–87, 130n1 Spivak, Gayatri, 44, 44n7, 46, 46n15, 57, 74n23, 75, 75n25, 222, 223n4 Strategic use of theory, 222 Subaltern studies, 25, 220, 222 Suffering servant, 27 Sugirtharajah, R. S., 1n1, 54, 54n46, 55, 55n50 Sung, Jung Mo, 227 T Tabula rasa, 40, 230 Taylor, Charles, 206 Taylor, Mark Lewis, 55, 56n51 Teocalli (god-houses), 107, 113, 118, 120 Teología india, 131, 135–137, 136n12, 136n14, 137n15, 141–143, 145

The Teozacoalco map, 98–103 Theological hermeneutics, 51 Theology of liberation, 25, 26, 197, 199, 201, 245 Theopoetic(s), 19, 228–232 Theopoetics and postcolonial critic, 229–232 Theory of dependence, 25 Thurman, Howard, 286 Tierra, Pedro, 259, 259n13, 260, 262, 263 Tiongia, Pauline, 65 Tlacuilos (native artists), 120n38, 121, 121n40 Tomichá, Roberto, 143–145, 143n31, 145n34 Transculturation, 52, 112 Transfeminicides, 213 Transmodernity, 26 Trans-theology, 42 Treaty of Paris, the (1763), 150 Trias, Eugenio, 230 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 52 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the (TRC), 147, 156, 158, 160 Turtle Island, 147–163 U United States of America, see United States, the United States, the, 14, 15, 25, 26, 31, 33, 37, 43, 44, 44n2, 46, 52, 65n4, 103, 148n2, 149, 150n5, 153n14, 162, 184, 185, 185n6, 202, 207, 271, 275, 279–283 Universian, see Kosmios (Universian: man of the universe) Universidad Iberoamericana of Mexico City, the (UIA), 204

 INDEX 

V Valencia, Martín de, 114, 114n21 Valladolid debate, the, 169, 174–178 Vatican II, the, 40, 40n28, 132, 139, 155, 244 Violence, 7, 9, 16, 18, 20, 34, 59, 87, 92, 94, 95, 104, 148, 149, 152, 153, 157, 160n31, 162, 171, 174, 178, 185–191, 194, 198–200, 206, 207, 211, 212, 217, 244, 246, 249, 251–253, 251n24, 260, 273, 279, 280, 282, 287 Vitoria, Francisco de, 57, 58n58, 176 W Wade, Peter, 18, 184, 186, 187, 191, 194, 195 Wake, Eleanor, 97, 97n14, 102, 103, 121n41 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 26, 35, 38, 38n24 Walsh, Catherine, 222

301

War(s) imperial wars, 58 justice of, 57 Warren, Kay, 65n4, 68 Weber, Max, 37 Weesakajack, 148, 148n2 Witchcraft, 191 Wynter, Sylvia, 4, 5n14, 177, 177n41, 179, 179n49 X Xenophobia, 49, 185, 212 Y Yala, Abya, 2, 17, 84, 84n50, 147–163 Z Zapatista uprising, the, 135, 137, 137n17 Zionism, 209 Zumbi Memorial, the, 262