I write this review as a Puerto Rican diasporic, light-skinned, cisgender male who works as a Roman Catholic systematic theologian. This is not simply a pro forma acknowledgment. Rather, it is demanded by this work. Teresa Delgado has written a powerful book that calls each reader to locate themselves in relation to the dramatic story of Puerto Rico. Her deft handling of Puerto Rican literary figures, and her substantive wrestling with weighty theological ideas, result in provocative questions around her three central themes: identity, suffering, and hope. Whether one is an islander, part of the diaspora, another Latinx identity, or one who may have thought themselves outside of this story, this book's ultimate power lies in delivering on its “decolonial” title. This text forces readers to reckon with a colonial reality and the ways that all are implicated by it.
Thus, it is from my location that I would like to note a few general areas in Delgado's study that I found particularly compelling. First, Delgado vividly captures the experience of the diasporic Puerto Rican community in powerful personal terms. Though the book is structured as an analysis of the works of significant Puerto Rican writers of the last century, it also performs that which it analyzes. That is, as Delgado leads the reader through the literary works of Esmeralda Santiago, Pedro Juan Soto, and Rosario Ferré—works in which the authors’ souls and life experiences are vibrantly laid bare in their characters—we encounter Delgado's own experiences and family history. Her book is itself one of literary imagination as much as it is an analysis of it. As her own personal story unfolded, I found myself identifying with much of what she described. She movingly gets at the worries, ambiguities, silences, and determination that are all part of Puerto Rican, and especially diasporic, identity.
As a Latino theologian, I found that the narrative style of the book convincingly suggests universal themes because it is rooted in particular stories. Whether those of characters from the literary works or her own experiences, Delgado's method captures the power of individual stories to make general claims about the human person and community. This is a method that has been fruitfully utilized by other Latinx theologians, including Virgilio Elizondo, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, and Roberto Goizueta. While those authors gave insight into Mexican American and Cuban American experiences respectively, Delgado's book is a much-needed complement from a Puerto Rican perspective. Moreover, the very ambiguity of that experience—for example, unlike any other Latinx population, Puerto Ricans are not “immigrants”—allows Delgado to explore human relationships in great depth.
As a theologian, I found Delgado's choice of Christopher Morse, and particularly, his well-known book, Not Every Spirit, as her central theological interlocutor an interesting one. Morse's text provides Delgado with a solid foundation from which to consider the theological subdisciplines of theological anthropology, soteriology, and eschatology with a critical eye. Deeply influenced by the postliberal “Yale” school of theology, Morse employs Christian “disbelief” as a way to undermine hidden assumptions and capitulations to the modern, secular ethos. In turn, Delgado utilizes this method to root out what are ultimately colonial assumptions about faith and politics. Theologically, Morse's via negativa inspires Delgado's approach, which ably carries out ideology (and idol) critique. This approach is not without its own failings, but to be sure, the negative method Delgado uses capably grounds the prophetic dimension of this book.
The final general area of strength I would like to mention is the way that Delgado seeks a postcolonial theological position. This means engaging the political reality of Puerto Rico, which is nothing short of colonial rule. In decades past, some might have squabbled that commonwealth status was not a colonial situation. However, with the delivery of its fiscal control to a nonelected board that has no need to answer to the Puerto Rican people, the status of colony is no exaggeration. It is to Delgado's credit that even though this book was written before Hurricane Maria and its disastrous aftermath, it speaks powerfully to this situation. As Delgado notes, coloniality is more than direct political control. It has a discursive power, and in that complex discursive network of symbols, stereotypes, so-called evidence, and so forth, the importance of literature and theology takes center stage. Treating the themes of identity, suffering, and hope, in conjunction with the Christian theological tradition's thinking on theological anthropology, soteriology, and eschatology, Delgado invites readers into a space where prophecy and freedom are imagined.
Delgado's treatment of Esmeralda Santiago's works provides a complex portrait of Puerto Rican identity. Its strength lies in not settling for comfortable or conforming stock identities. Whether as a Puerto Rican or a woman, islander or diasporic, Santiago's characters illumine the fragile and messy process that is identity formation. Understanding Santiago's life and memory as parallel to that of the island and people, Delgado employs her negative analysis. She notes, “Her life and memory demonstrate, above all else, that often we know what we do not want in our lives before we discover what we do. The via negativa is clearer than the path our life's journey is bound to take” (80). This negative angle is brought to the dialogue with theological anthropology, where Delgado emphasizes that Puerto Rican identity need not be an “either/or” decision. Using the biblical portrait of Rachel, another debt to Morse, Delgado puts forward a theological anthropology where human identity before God is “ambiguous and multifaceted.”
While the advocacy of an ambiguous anthropology works at one level, it comes into tension with a political outlook that appears to privilege independence. So, while, on the one hand, the book seems to advocate the richness of being “in between,” on the other hand, Delgado describes the refusal to make a choice between statehood or independence as “immature” (77). There is a subtle thread running through the book that political independence is the only acceptable decolonial option. Though this “adulthood” might seem like an obvious choice, it abandons the ambiguity that otherwise seems like a positive in her discussion of identity/anthropology. Unfortunately, here is where Morse's very traditional categories offer little assistance. When she adverts to Elizondo and Cone, a more robust discussion begins. One only wishes that Delgado had gone further with them as interlocutors, or even better, that trans and queer theologians had been brought to the discussion as well. After all, might it be the case that a refusal to be boxed in by the either/or of statehood/independence finds a parallel illumined by the queering of restrictive binaries in those theologies?
The treatment of suffering, using the lens of Pedro Juan Soto's works, conveys in a visceral way the challenges that the Puerto Rican people have faced. Violence, betrayal, and cruelty haunt his characters. Once again, Delgado's finger is on the pulse of the diasporic experience as she sees it in the character of Eduardo (from Hot Land, Cold Season): the need for “reconciliation between the two parts of himself which have yet to become one, the Puerto Rican and US American” (121). It is the question of suffering that turns her to the theological idea of salvation.
She arrives at the provocative theological claim that the encounter with God means being stripped of everything. It is a weighty notion, and it needs a great deal of nuance lest it be utilized to justify suffering and oppression. I could hear the strenuous objections of Ta-Nehisi Coates ringing in my ears that we do not need any more broken bodies to find redemption. Unfortunately, the reliance on Morse, with the categories of salvation by grace, from sin, and for righteousness, does not provide enough material to give this nuance. As in the previous chapter, Delgado lands on firmer ground by engaging the work of a theologian like Gustavo Gutiérrez. Yet, even here, the limitations of weighing such large theological themes in single chapters loom large. For while much of what Gutiérrez says about salvation in A Theology of Liberation is rich, and Delgado deploys it well, there has been development in that thought that could be even more beneficial. Indeed, having intoned the question of unjust suffering through Soto's work, Delgado would be well served by Gutiérrez's subsequent work on Job and Las Casas. There the Peruvian liberation theologian develops a more profound understanding of God's gratuitous nature in the face of unjust suffering, and he gives voice to a liberation spirituality rooted in solidarity and the preferential option for the poor that echoes Delgado's own vision.
The final body chapter considers the theme of hope in the works of Rosario Ferré, and it delivers on the same fronts as the previous ones. Delgado captures the complexity of the Puerto Rican experience, especially the diasporic, by engaging the question, “Where do we go from here?” Perhaps it is in part the richness of Ferré as an author, but the analysis here seemed particularly nuanced and fresh. On the identity question, this chapter handles the question of race with the most depth. Indeed, Delgado articulates a complex liberation/reconciliation at the level of race as mulatizaje that is much more satisfying than a political insistence on independence. On hope, spatial metaphors—lagoon, neighborhood, waters, island—communicate profound, even mythic, insights and open themselves to theological treatment.
Of course, articulating the hope for the future says a lot about how one views the present and what one determines is the proper course of action to arrive at that future. Delgado demonstrates clearly that Christian hope does not mean fatalistic resignation to injustice or utopian dreaming of a next life that empties social and political commitments in the present. Once again, the strength of using Morse's categories comes in providing a frame to think about the subject and a way of rejecting certain theological distortions. On the whole, however, the chapter finds a better depth on the subject as she considers the works of James Cone, Justo González, and Virgilio Elizondo. Indeed, one wishes that she had gone further into their thinking and that of womanist and Latina thinkers to get at that hope expressed in concrete commitments linked to lofty expectations. The “revolving door” provides an image of ongoing transformation “that connects the past with the present, and both with the future” (173).
In an essay written after an earthquake devastated El Salvador, Jon Sobrino described it as an X-ray that revealed the inner workings of the country. Using that metaphor, I would like to say that Teresa Delgado has done a great service as a kind of radiologist. She has scanned the evidence found in the literary works of Puerto Rican authors and has provided a powerful diagnosis. Anyone wishing to learn more about the Puerto Rican, and particularly diasporic, soul would do well to read this book. Yet, that is only one of its gifts. Delgado's engagement with the Christian theological tradition suggests many “therapies” for this patient. The first course of treatment is to do away with distortions of Christianity that have justified the colonial domination of the island and its people. On this point, Delgado is at her strongest. Any decolonial thinker who dismisses Christianity as too embedded in coloniality to be helpful will have to reckon with this book.
Of course, the negative therapy should lead to a positive one. Though there are encouraging moments in the book, this is one area that I hope Delgado develops in her future work. Further engagement with theologies working from marginal spaces can provide positive utopic images that foster hope. Moreover, to borrow Gutiérrez's phrase, a theology that critically reflects on the praxis of post-Maria Puerto Rico in light of the word of God will ensure that any utopic vision is grounded in real solidarity. In this way, while Delgado's negative method provides much prophecy in this book, further elaboration of her insights will be able to make substantial truth claims about the nature of and steps toward freedom.
