Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering.Footnote 1
This essay grows out of the Convocation Address at the Harvard Divinity School in September 2006 in which I argued that we live in a world of geopolitical, cultural, and religious borderlands. By using the word “borderlands” instead of “globalization” or “world” or “borderline,” I am referring not only to the dramatic and expanding U.S.-Mexican borderlands where diverse cultures, languages, and religious practices (and for the present, political campaigns) meet, “bump,”Footnote 2 contend, and transform each other, but also to the borderlands as a perspective and lens through which to interpret and understand the dramatically changing religious, social, and cultural landscapes in which we are all living today. Borderlands means for me the geographical, political, and cultural landscapes straddling countries but also the existential conditions of people who often, if not continually, find themselves at the crossroads of their lives and seek new combinations of resources—cultural and religious—to carry on creative struggles for survival and to thrive. When I read of history's configurations and ruptures, the center-oriented places and eccentric innovations, the rulers and the rebels, it is then that the places and powers of the borderlands and the people who live in-between continually confront me, stretching out to me again and again. The position I shall take in this essay reflects, in part, my participation in a public debate at the Divinity School (the year before) with Samuel P. Huntington about his recent work, Who are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity, a book that includes a demeaning description and interpretation of Mexican and Mexican-American peoples.Footnote 3 Huntington argues that American Identity—by which he means U.S. culture and politics—is founded on a “core culture” of Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking values and practices. Huntington's view of social and religious history in the United States, I argued, ignores the significant dynamics of the many cultural crossroads and religious borderlands that have always done more to generate American identity as lived experiences than his provincial “cultural cores.” In my Convocation Address I also urged our school to further deprovincialize itself by attending to the colonial history and religious creativity of Latin American religions in order to grasp more fully the borderland realities that are becoming apparent in the United States as a result of immigration from these other Americas. By doing this we shall be able to move our discourse on race to a discourse on race mixture, and our discussions of hybridity to an engagement with the more realistic asymmetrical hybridities.
There will be some very helpful surprises as we attend to Latin American and Latino/a borders and borderlands. For instance—as Michael Jackson writes elsewhere in this issue about interpretive developments in anthropology—the new awareness of globalization led to the realization that the postmodern condition is defined by notions of “diffusion, diaspora and hybridization.”Footnote 4 But as Jackson's work shows in a parallel way through his studies in Australia and Sierra Leone, when we study the history of religions in Latin America, and even in parts of North America, we discover that hybridization and diaspora have always been crucial parts of the daily life, content, making of culture, and the religious imagination from the earliest Euro-African-Indigenous contacts until today. In this way, the peregrinations, invasions, rebellions, and exchanges in borderland places such as New Orleans and Boston, Cuba and Martinique, Rio and Esmeraldas (Ecuador), Mexico City and San Francisco, North Carolina and South Dakota have always constituted, defined, and transformed the Americas.
A host of publications reflect the critical values and development of borderlands thinking, of which I mention only a few here, including Border Visions: Mexican Cultures of the Southwest United States by Carlos Vélez e Ibáñez, The Future is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet by Virgilio Elizondo, Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse by Carlos Gutierrez Jones, and the brilliant memoir Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation by John Phillip Santos. Perhaps the most powerful expression of borderlands thinking appears in Gloria Anzaldúa's bilingual Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Walter Mignolo credits Gloria Anzaldúa with achieving an interpretive breakthrough in this work, a new and different way of thinking about the complex cultural histories of the Americas. He writes:
Anzaldúa's great theoretical contribution is to create a space-in-between from where to think rather than a hybrid space to talk about, a hybrid thinking-space of Spanish/Latin American and Amerindian legacies as the condition of possibility for Spanish/Latin American and Amerindian postcolonial theories.Footnote 5
In this essay I shall explore the hybrid-thinking spaces, contact zones, and cultural creativity of specific Latin American and Latino/a religious expressions as reflected in the terms of my title “borderlands,” “biblical,” and “hurricane.” In doing so I shall emphasize not only the life worlds of these expressions but also the rhythms of life (i.e., the dynamic interchanges and expressions that constituted and renewed the religious imaginations and life-worlds of the borderland Americans). Ethnographically when referring to “biblical borderlands,” I shall focus on the religious expressions of Jaguar Christians, the Catholic saint, Santiago, the Cristos de Caña as transculturated by Indians in Mexico, as well as the borderlands' ceremonial landscape of the Virgin of Guadalupe. We shall see that in one case Indians themselves choose to be Christians and to Christianize their Sun God, in another case they transformed the saint's horse into an indigenous animal, while in the corn stalk Jesus, the Indian artists camouflage their complex remaking of the biblical figure. In the example of La Virgen de Guadalupe, I shall show how the official texts of the apparitions map out a dynamic ceremonial landscape, a ritual borderland that consists of competing ceremonial centers—one representing the colonizer, and the other representing the pre-Columbian world of the now colonized. When I refer to “hurricane,” I shall discuss some constructions of race mixture in various parts of Latin America where the Iberian, Aboriginal, and African peoples met, became involved sexually, and produced offspring of different hues and political meanings. I shall add a comment about the creative art of the writer, Gloria Anzaldúa, and the musician, Jose Cuellar, [Dr. Loco, pseud.], to illustrate how two Chicano artists work from in-between spaces to think, write, and make music.
Borderlands as Expanding Cultural Territories
I'm not an immigrant. My family has lived in the San Antonio Valley before this country was a country. So it is for many Latinos. We didn't come to you. You came to us.Footnote 6
When I was a child we considered the borderland to be that space from Chihuahua to Las Cruces, from Los Angeles to Corpus Christi, an area which Carlos Veléz e Ibanez writes is filled with an unequal “distribution of sadness,”Footnote 7 by which he means the overrepresentation of Mexicans in poverty, crime, illness, and war. In his book, Vélez e Ibáñez also shows how Mexicans in the borderlands have produced significant literary and artistic works which reflect and deal with this sadness. Like a number of scholars, he sees these border visions as developing, not on one side of a borderline but constantly crossing and crisscrossing both sides of the border and thereby mapping out a “Greater Mexican Southwest.” He writes “There are different labels for this area—the Spanish Borderlands, the Greater Southwest, the Greater Mexican Northwest and even Northern Mesoamerica. Whatever label is used, for me the area encompasses the southwestern United States and northern Mexico.”Footnote 8 Another Mexican-American scholar, the historian Albert Camarillo, has mapped out the historical context for Mexican immigration into this bulging borderlands and has discovered a very significant temporal depth to the cultural history of the Greater Mexican Southwest. He writes,
For nearly four hundred years since the establishment of Spanish colonial settlement in New Mexico in the early seventeenth century, mestizo people from Mexico have traveled north into the region that today borders the United States and Mexico. Hardy frontier people—soldiers, missionaries, and civilians, men and women—settled the sparsely populated far northern borderlands, first for the Spanish crown and later for the Republic of Mexico (1821–1848). After the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848, the once northern provinces were annexed by the United States and a new international boundary line separated the two nations. About a hundred thousand former Mexican citizens opted to remain in their native lands, as they became Americans by virtue of the treaty that settled the war. For nearly seventy years after the war, Mexicans could freely cross the Rio Grande river into Texas or travel without interference across the largely imaginary lien in the desert between Mexico and the United States elsewhere in the region.Footnote 9
Camarillo outlines four significant periods of the movement of Mexican peoples into the United States including 1) the first Great Migration from 1910–1920, 2) the Bracero Era of 1942–1964, 3) the “Los Mojados” period of the 1950s, and 4) the Second Great Migration from the 1970's to the present.Footnote 10 The primary motive for these immigrants has been the search for opportunity and economic stability through labor in agricultural fields, railroads, factories, and industries. The results were profound in economic and cultural terms and resulted in complex exchanges between laboring peoples and employers, migrant workers and owners, English speakers and Spanish speakers, plus the sharing and mixing of musical traditions, cuisines, languages, and families. For many peoples and cultural practices, the borderlands are a space of “back and forthness” where families and their cultural practices move back and forth, constantly rejuvenating and challenging the traditions and evolving communities they leave and join. It is important to emphasize that economic institutions on the U.S. side of the border—including the U.S. government—actively recruited Mexican and Latin American workers and benefited significantly from their presence. Camarillo speaks to the power of this labor history when he writes,
Immigration from Mexico to the United States in the twentieth century is not only the most prolonged movement of people in American immigration history, it is also the largest sustained international labor migration in the world. Since 1942, when the Bracero Program was initiated, over 6.3 million Mexicans have crossed the border in to the United States, with the greatest numbers of immigrants arriving during the 1980's and 1990's.Footnote 11
What is so conveniently and tragically forgotten is that the U.S. border has migrated into other political and cultural territories on many occasions, thereby expanding the U.S.-Mexican borderlands over vast territories. The U.S. border moved south in 1848 after the Mexican-American War to include California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Colorado and Utah. The U.S. border expanded again in 1898 to engulf Puerto Rico in an annexation that is still in hot dispute. Now the borderlands are shifting again as Spanish, Portuguese, and Creole languages, food, literature, art, family patterns, religious faiths and imaginations, sexual fire, musical heat, myths, athletes, and ideas migrate north and spread out in all directions. One advertiser calls Latinos “Mega Bueno.” As I have shown elsewhere, the real borderlands today are cities: Los Angeles, the great linguistic, social, and racial borderlands linking the Pacific “rim” to the United States and Mexico; New York about which some said recently, “the good thing about New York City is that it is so close to the United States.” In his book, La Memoria Rota (The Broken Memory) Puerto Rican cultural critic Arcadio Díaz Quiñones shows us that parts of New York have been a Caribbean city for over one hundred years. A city blessed with such Caribeños as José Martí, Celia Cruz, Eugenio Maria de Hostos, Machito, and Tito Puente. We now hear the bomba, plena, and salsa sounds in immigrant neighborhoods from Lorrain, Ohio to Hartford, Connecticut, from Perth Amboy to Hawaii. Other cities that have become political and cultural borderlands with strong Latino/a presences are Miami, City on the Edge; Denver, City in the Air; Boston, City that is Green Once a Year; San Juan, City in the Painful Sea; El Paso/Juarez, City of the Violated Outrage; San Francisco, City of Culture Clash and Barrio Mission. Today it is said that the Latin American-U.S. Borderlands stretch from Chile to Wisconsin and Seattle, Washington. It is also important to remember as John Coatsworth—the economic historian of Mexico—has discovered, that forty-two times in the twentieth century, that is once every eighteen months, the U.S. government was involved, directly and indirectly, covertly and overtly, in regime changes in many Latin American countries. Border crossings have been made in all directions and one of the reasons so many Latin Americans are migrating here is because the United States has been “there” so many times and with such force.
Writings From Within the Borderlands
As Michael Jackson says about borderland writing, “we need novel forms of academic writing and interdisciplinary thought that place non-European and European epistemologies and theologies on the same footing.”Footnote 12 In my view Latin America has produced novel forms of interdisciplinary thought that illuminate the dramatic interactions between non-European and European lives—both epistemologies and theologies—and in some cases, represent what can be called a “borderland epistemology” that shows how peoples who underwent colonial domination created new forms of knowledge that contained elements, to varying degrees, of African, European, and indigenous world views and rhythms of life.
Consider the long list of Nobel Prizes in Literature given to Latin American writers in the second half of the twentieth century. Gabriela Mistral from Chile won the prize in 1947 in part for her Cartas de Amor y Desamore and for exploring how Latin American identity is formed from a mixture of Indian and European influences. In 1966 Miguel Angel Asturias from Guatemala won the prize in part for his Hombres de Maiz which illuminated the magical world of indigenous religion. Called the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language, Pablo Neruda from Chile won the prize in 1971 in recognition of his epic Canto General. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude hit the literary world of Latin America and then the world like an earthquake in 1982. Writing about Garcia Marquez in the New York Times, William Kennedy remarked, “One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. It takes up not long after Genesis left off and carries us through the air age.”
I can think of other writers that we should also be required to read, but divinity school students would do well to pay more attention to the religious dimensions of this and other Latin American writings. The Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz won the Nobel Prize in 1990 in part for his The Labyrinth of Solitude in which the national character of Mexico is cast in a rich narrative about the interactions of Aztec, Catholic, European, and African peoples. The African-Latin American borderlands is highlighted by the Derek Wolcott 1992 prize, in part for his epic Omeros. Throughout his work, Wolcott has explored how his identity is rooted in a fusion of African, Asian, and European stories, struggles, and meanings. We can also mention the borderland writings of Carlos Fuentes, Isabelle Allende of Chile, Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina, Jose Marti of Cuba and Nelida Piñon of Brazil.
I mention these names and prizes to make two points. First, I want to emphasize the deep narratives of engagement with the cultural and racial borderlands in Latin American identities. These novels and poems also show us the diversity within the Latin American borderlands where European and indigenous and African languages and religious practices engage with one another, resulting in rich combinations and mixtures. Part of what we learn is that culture and religions are very different in Chile from what they are in Guatemala, remarkably diverse in Colombia in ways that seem worlds away from the mixtures found in Mexico and Brazil.
My second point in invoking these Nobel Prize Winners from Latin America is that the crux of their achievements was the creation of new narrative languages written from within the various cultural borderlands, entangled histories, and border crossings between the epistemologies and theologies of Europe, Africa, Latin America, and in some cases, Asia. These writers somehow dwell, imagine, and write from that space in-between rather than about hybrid experiences and expressions. What Octavio Paz says in his Nobel prize lecture about transplanted European languages can be said about transplanted European, African, and even Asian religions in Latin America. He tells us that
The European languages … planted in an unknown and unnamed world: they took root in the new lands and, as they grew within the societies of America, they were transformed. They are the same plant yet also a different plant. Our literatures did not passively accept the changing fortunes of the transplanted languages: they participated in the process and even accelerated it. They very soon ceased to be mere transatlantic reflections: at times they have been the negation of the literatures of Europe; more often, they have been a reply.Footnote 13
As recent scholarship has shown, the religious practices in Latin American Candomble, Santeria, Guadalupe worship, liberation theology, and Pentecostalism are shaped in part by the trans-Atlantic exchanges between Europe, Africa, and indigenous America—sometimes a protest, more often a reply—filled with innovation and transculturation.
Borderlands as Critical Orientation in the Contact Zones
Gloria Anzaldúa is not the first writer to teach me hybrid thinking spaces in the study of religion and culture and to apply them to the complexities and mysteries of Latin America. This distinction goes to Charles H. Long who, in his now classic Significations, insisted that “a method must be found whereby we deal with the religious history of all the American peoples.”Footnote 14 Anticipating borderlands epistemology he continues,
I suggest that we might begin by defining this culture as an Aboriginal-Euro-African culture. The terms should not be seen as simply additive or descriptive. The terms are relational. This means that these meanings should always form the background for any discussion of American religion at any historical period.Footnote 15
In Latin America we can define it as Aboriginal-Iberian-African culture(s), a prodigious series of contact zones wherein hybrid worlds of living, forming families, worshiping, and arguing were cultivated. Taking the matter deeper, Long writes elsewhere about the profound interpretive borderlands that developed during the decades we associate with the development of the modern sciences. Focusing on the study of religion and anthropology, he affirms that, like all modes of study, they are children of the Enlightenment and therein critical orientations were sought and achieved new and different modes of understanding. Then, exposing what has often been hidden in the histories of our disciplines, Long writes,
The other critical element in the discussion of religion in the modern world is related to the Western exploration of the world that is symbolized by the voyages of Christopher Columbus in the late fifteenth century. From that time until the twentieth century, the Western world, through conquest, trade and colonialism, made contact with every part of the globe. These encounters and confrontations with other cultures raised again the issue of religion. Did all peoples possess religion or were there cultures that were devoid of the religious sentiment? If religion was a form of human meaning that might be dispensed with, what status should one allow the religions of these other cultures? Is there a continuity of some sort between the religions of other cultures and the religions that are part of the Western meaning of religion?Footnote 16
But the combination of Enlightenment methods and epistemologies with the violent opening of a New World led not so much to better understanding of others as to intellectual strategies which “paved the ground for historical evolutionary thinking, racial theories and forms of color symbolism that made the economic and military conquest of various cultures and peoples justifiable and defensible.”Footnote 17
Long's work anticipates not only Anzaldua's hybrid-thinking space but also the highly useful notions of “contact zone” and “transculturation” elaborated by Mary Louise Pratt. The borderlands of Enlightenment epistemologies and European invasions of the Americas led to massive exchanges between members of these tripartite and new cultures. Pratt describes the contact zone as a place of tense interface of cultures. The “Contact Zone” is
the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict … often within radically asymmetrical relations of power. By using the term contact, I aim to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionest accounts of conquest and domination.Footnote 18
The improvisation of narratives takes place as an expression of “transculturation” when dominated peoples select and invent from materials transmitted to them from both the dominant culture and their own indigenous traditions. They work with what they absorb and what they sustain. What Pratt does not speak about adequately are the ways that all participants in the contact zones—including the privileged, the Europeans, the arrival of the White People—transculturate (i.e., pick and choose, mix, and reinvent elements of their own and the others' cultures). As the devotion to La Virgen de Guadalupe shows, it is not just the indigenous peoples, the mestizos, or the mulattos who are picking and choosing from competing cultural traditions, it is also the priests, the bishops, the viceroys, and the local rulers. I am impressed with the theme of creative work, of translation, and of transculturation that takes place in the contact zone.
The spatial sense of the analogy contact zone reminds me of other terms that have appeared in postcolonial scholarship that refer to our interpretive position as a “critical landscape” or an “undone interval” or the more down home “street buzz” or as Stuart Hall says “thinking at the limit.”Footnote 19
I insist that we follow these spatial tropes in our explorations of the borderlands and its biblical dimensions to understand better the inter-subjectivities that take shape in religious images such as Mayan Christianity, the cult of Santiago, and the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Hybridity and Jaguar Christians at the Beginning of the “Americas”
One example of creative struggles and hybridity during the encuentro (meeting) between newly arrived Europeans and Indigenous peoples is recounted in Munroe Edmonson's translation and commentary on the colonial Mayan manuscript—The Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin—a document that recounts Mayan history from the seventh through the ninteenth centuries. It is a book about social and religious transformations, including passages that tell us that the native priests took the initiative to Christianize their Sun God. It is significant that the invading Spaniards appear in the text “as an annoying but shadowy and largely irrelevant presence, alluded to by nicknames”Footnote 20 and not as the thundering conquistadores that the Spaniards paint themselves to have been. Mayan history tells us that a borderlands reality, not a conquest reality, was underway almost immediately upon contact between Europeans and Mayans. In this fragment from the Tizimin manuscript we find an excellent example of a critical, hybrid narrative about their new world and how they become what I have called “Jaguar Christians,” or Christians in terms of the Mayan worldview.
The passage begins by identifying the city of Merida (a colonial city built on top of a Mayan site) as the “seat” or central place of a twenty-year period and then describes a decision the Mayans made—the decision to ask the Spaniards to baptize them into the Christian religion. Following the report of the civil war between enemy Mayan communities and a famine that struck the land, the “Spokesman of the Jaguar” narrated the “scattering” of songs among the Maya saying:
Your younger brothers are coming!
Your older brothers are arriving
To change your pants,
To change your clothes,
To whiten your dress
To whiten your pants—
The foreign judges,
The bearded men
Of Heaven Born Merida,
The seat of the lands.
And they
Are the Sun priests
Of the living God
The True God.
He shall be worshipped
In one communion
On earth
Below:
An additional
Rule
And for the fatherless,
And for the motherless-
Jaguar was the head
And urged his people
To be sprinkled in the changed city.
So came about
Its founding,
And it was the founding of the three-part rule
In Heaven Born MeridaFootnote 21
First, we are told that singers spread the word throughout Mayan communities that some people had arrived—the bearded Spaniards who are referred to not as strangers, but in terms of respect and kinship (younger and older brothers). “They came to change you,” the Spokesman of the Jaguar announced, “to change your clothes and the color of your clothes.” These new arrivals have more power than the Maya and they reside in the seat of power in “Heaven Born Merida.” This city has a celestial prestige, it is born in heaven! At this point we can suspect an improvisation, a “translation” of indigenous ideas into the narrative for in some pre-Hispanic documents—pyramids, temples, and other ceremonial buildings descend from heaven to earth and establish the prestige of being the axis mundi in the community! The presence of the native voice and improvization continues in the next passage about the “Sun priests of the living God, the True God.” In pre-Hispanic times the Sun Priests were Mayan leaders in charge of religious organizations, solar gods, calendar cycles, agriculture, and its most precious fruit, corn. Here, the indigenous term is redirected to the Catholic priests. The phrase Hahal Ku (True God) in Mayan is their term for the Christian God but since we have seen one type of theological dexterity (i.e., the Christian Priest becomes a Sun Priest), why not suspect another—gods of the contact zone. This is likely when we realize that the Hahal Ku, (True God, that is, the Christian God), and the Hunah Ku (sole Creator God, or the the Mayan God) were merged into one God around this period. The reference to the Catholic Mass, “He shall be worshipped in one communion on Earth Below,” presents us with the question of who was being worshipped and how was it done? The final message in the fragment about “The Additional Rule” refers to the internal violence and the impact of Spanish coercion on the natives for the latter have been left fatherless and motherless (i.e., those who lost their families, their lineage, and perhaps even some access to their ancestors). Then we meet the Jaguar, the highest native official in Mayan communities who controlled public offices, land titles, and tribute rights in local communities. “The Jaguar was the head” who tells his people, now living in the borderlands of “New Spain” to be “sprinkled” (i.e., baptized in the changed city) and it is this action and place that marks the “founding” of a new world.
biblical
I use the term “biblical” in lower case to indicate my interest in how Indigenous American and African peoples as well as mestizos, mulattos, and Europeans in the New World received, utilized, and transformed Biblical teachings and Christian stories, saints, and imports. I am just as interested in knowing what local peoples in the Americas made of Biblical stories (and the new meanings made out of them) as I am interested in knowing what was taught in the changed cities. This creative reworking is seen clearly in the reinterpretation by native peoples in Mexico of the Catholic saint, Santiago. Santiago stood most clearly for the violence done to native Americans by Spaniards in the conquest period. Santiago arrived from Spain as the symbol of the Reconquista, a 750-year expansion of Christian kingdoms successfully recovering the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslim states of Al-Andalus. Santiago was often depicted on his white horse crushing cowering Muslims holding their typical swords—a sign of Christianity on the move, the holy war against Islam in Iberia. In the accounts of the conquest of Mexico, Santiago appears in visions and as an inspiration to insure Spanish victory over the heathen, idol-worshipping Mayans and Aztecs. As one scholar writes about the saint's grand triumphalist meaning, “he was claimed by the Franciscans as patron for their evangelical province of Xalisco and by the Dominicans for their province of Mexico. To Spaniards, he came to symbolize their destiny to rule and the Indians' destiny to submit.”Footnote 22 This Christian triumphalism is reflected in the names of towns in Mexico and the United States as Matamoros, “kill the Moors.” But in the borderland conditions of colonial Mexico, Santiago's powers were understood to be available to Indians as well. In fact, the indigenous people who fell under his wrath believed him to be associated with their own gods of lightning and thunder and they thought that if an Indian converted to Christianity, Santiago's powers would be extended to him or her. This ambiguity is reflected in his being chosen, often with the support of local Indians, as the patron saint of over eighty-one colonial settlements. Additionally, many prominent Indian men were baptized Santiago and took his name as their own surname. More importantly, the native peoples saw Santiago from within their particular understanding of the cosmos and its sacred animals. Their reworking of Santiago into their own creation shows how religious interpretations in the borderland/contact zone sometimes works. Taylor writes,
Santiago's attraction to Indian neophytes consisted partly in his horse. Judging by the monumental representations of fanged serpents and their intimate association between eagles or jaguars and the most esteemed warriors, the pre-colonial societies of central Mexico prized the large, fierce animals around them as important agents of divine power and authority. According to Inga Clendinnen, Mexican warriors regarded the Spaniards' horses not as obedient brutes or emblems of the owners' social standing, but as courageous and powerful animal warriors that may have acted in unison with their riders but were independent of them.Footnote 23
Scholarship on Santiago in Mexico illustrates that the longer the Indians had access to Santiago images and powers, the less he remained a symbol of the Conquest and the more he was “harnessed to local purposes—to heal, protect and fertilize.”Footnote 24 In one case an Indian healer named María insisted that she had had intercourse with an invisible Spaniard who, like Santiago, came to her on a white horse, an act that resulted in the enhancement of her healing powers that were used primarily for indigenous peoples. In other parts of Mexico, Santiago assisted with the weather because of his powers of thunder and lightning, was celebrated in the dance of the cristianos (Christians) and moros (Moors)—primarily by native peoples—and sometimes disappeared from the dramatic scene as when his horse, upon receiving offerings of corn, assisted Indian women in getting pregnant. As Taylor sums it up, “His various meanings were rooted not only in the official Spanish messages about conquest and conversion, but also in native understandings of animals and the sacred, and in adjustments to colonial rule at the local level.”Footnote 25
Cristos de Caña as Places of Transculturation
The examples of Jaguar Christians and Santiago have traditionally and conveniently been handled under the ubiquitous and lazy category of syncretism—a term which the recent Harper Collins Dictionary of Religion evaluates as “a term of dubious heritage and limited usefulness often employed to ascribe insincerity, confusion, or other negative qualities to a nascent religious group.”Footnote 26 Inga Clendinnen in her helpful essay “Ways to the Sacred: Reconstructing ‘Religion' in Sixteenth-Century Mexico” goes even further when she writes, “syncretism is not even a teachable proposition because we are not faced with a creative mixing of divergent traditions but with the inexactability of a profoundly different way of conceptualizing the world and man's place within it.”Footnote 27 One example of borderland thinking that goes beyond syncretism is found in the Cristos de Caña, the hollow, paper mache-like images of Christ on the Cross, made of plants and produced in Mexico by Indians during the colonial period. They show that the forms of colonial Indians' Christianity were more orthodox than the content!—outwardly looking as though a real conquest of native ways to the sacred had been, if not hammered, reworked artistically to appear more European than those made by Europeans. The Cristo de Caña that was displayed in the 1992 exhibit “Mexico, Splendor of Thirty Centuries” illustrated the combination of artistry and violence in the life-size figure of the crucified Jesus. These Christs were made from “corn stalks and corn pitch, orchid-bulb glue, carpenter's paste, and a fine clay stucco surface wrapped around a wooden frame—made by Indians indicating that there Christianity appears outwardly well formed to a European eye.”Footnote 28 But a closer look at an accidental discovery of what was inside reveals that these were objects of the contact zone! William Taylor in his masterful study writes,
These light crucifixes from the early colonial period, whose materials connected Christ's passage through birth, death and resurrection to the regeneration of the sacred food plant, maize, sometimes contained writing that would have added to the figures' sacred energy, at least for the maker.Footnote 29
In the case of a Cristo de Caña from Mexicaltzingo, an Indian pueblo in the Valley of Mexico south of the city, there is evidence that more improvisation than conquest was at work. It was Antonio Carrillo y Gariel who, while studying Cristos de Caña, discovered what was inside when one fell from a wall and broke open. When an examination was made, they found that the chest cavity, abdomen, and upper arms of Jesus were formed around three types of documents that had come to have powerful meanings for the native artists. These documents included pages of sixteenth-century community tax records in native style, substantial fragments of Nahuatl texts on Spanish paper, and in Roman script, documents about the life of Christ, and most surprisingly of all, a stencil (perhaps an embroidery pattern) of Raphael's painting, “il Pasmo de Sicilia,” depicting Christ's fall on the road to Calvary. These native artists—who became Christians who worked with the local priests—had secretly combined texts and meanings from both indigenous and European cultures in their creation of an outwardly Christian but inwardly borderlands Jesus. One could argue that this was what one scholar called an “idols behind altars”Footnote 30 pattern, but it is more likely that we are witnessing a secret history of religious transculturation. This history says that the image of Christ was associated with 1) the community's forced payments to authorities but recorded in the native style as found in other indigenous tribute documents, 2) the life of Jesus as told, not in the conqueror's language, but in the lingua franca of the Aztec empire, and 3) the suffering of Indians (falling on the road to Calvary). What might be overlooked is that this image of a multicultural, sympathetic Jesus is made of the most sacred food plant in all of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica (i.e., corn). Corn was not only food but one of the key materials that provided a way to the sacred in indigenous eyes. This ritual improvisation is a good example of how indigenous peoples, seeking the spiritual knowledge of Spaniards while keeping their own religious habits alive, took control of what the outsiders brought in and made use of it in their own terms. This Cristo de Caña is a “camouflaged vision of place” that allows a people under ideological siege to put a false vision of conquest in focus while disguising their own interpretation of a ritual image.
Guadalupe's Ceremonial Landscape as a Borderland
A common phrase is that “Mexico was born at Tepeyac” which refers to the four apparitions of the Virgen de Guadalupe at the sacred hill of Tepeyac (at that time located far outside of Mexico City) that today serves as the site of the Catholic Patronness of all the Americas. Theological interpretations of these apparitions emphasize the religious experiences of two individuals (the two Juans) who came into contact with La Virgen de Guadalupe—the lowly Indian Juan Diego, and the elevated Spaniard Juan de Zummaraga. However, my reading of the Guadalupe texts as a hybrid-thinking, ritual space shows the mapping out of a ceremonial landscape that emphasizes social and religious boundary crossings that link two opposing “centers” into a ritual borderland that has become the quintessential ritual space of Mexico. In the Guadalupe case, the ceremonial landscape consists (referring to the indigenous terms mentioned in the authoritative seventeenth-century document Nican Mopohua) of 1) the altepetl of Mexico (i.e., the city of Mexico that was the capital of New Spain where the Spaniards ruled), 2) the altepetl of Tepeyac (i.e., the indigenous altepetl—hill of water—where natives worshiped their own mother goddess Tonantzin before and after the apparitions), and 3) the pilgrimage spaces in between the two locations.
This image of the Virgin of Guadalupe is in the huge church located at the foot of the sacred hill of Tepeyac several miles from the colonial center of Mexico City. The apparition stories narrate how her apparitions and conversations with Juan Diego as well as his walks in between the hill and the archbishop's palace map the formation of a religious borderlands.
The texts tell of a pattern of repeated ascents and descents of the sacred hill, the pilgrimage to the bishop's palace in the city, and the return to the hill. Guadalupe calls Juan Diego up the hill in the early morning and gives him instructions to descend the hill and go into the city to deliver the good news of her appearance and her command that a shrine is to be built in her honor on the sacred hill. He does so and is rejected, returning to the hill. He ascends the hill, delivers news of his rejection by the bishop, and begs to be let out of his task as the Virgin's messenger to Spanish authorities. He is ordered down the hill and into the city once again where he is rejected a second time, now with the demand that he produce a “sign” of the Virgin's appearance. He returns to Tepeyac (after first avoiding the task of delivering yet again the bad news of his rejection by the bishop) and after being greeted by Guadalupe is sent to the top of the hill where he gathers blooming flowers (although it is December and flowers are out of season) into his tilma or cloak. He is sent down the hill yet again and into the city where he presents, to an astonished bishop and his retinue, the spectacular image of La Virgen de Guadalupe imprinted on his tilma, as flower petals fall out onto the floor. The bishop, reversing the usual postures of submission and domination, kneels in front of Juan Diego and the Virgin's image, weeping and pledging to carry out her command to build a shrine in her honor outside of the city at the hill of Tepeyac. This back and forth action—ascent, descent, and journey to the city, retreat from the city, return to the city, and return to the hill—maps out what is to become, in the social history of Guadalupe devotion, the required, official ceremonial pathways between the city and the hill. This story of religious experiences and a ceremonial landscape also encodes a “borderlands epistemology”—the ways oppressed peoples recognize their identities in colonial situations by creating new, hybrid forms of knowledge. A borderlands epistemology is a new order of knowledge characterized by a consciousness among the oppressed about the permanently broken, uneven world they live in combined with new ritual and symbolic strategies for redefining the ultimate significance of their lives in the borderlands.
To understand the power that this borderlands epistemology has to create new religious expressions, (with members of the Spanish elite and the Indian Christians all doing the work of transculturation) attention must be given to competing significances (in scholarship and in the text itself) of the notion of the word altepetl. The Nahuatl word altepetl is a difrasismo, or indigenous linguistic form that consists of two distinct words that are combined to express a third meaning. There are examples of difrasismos from many aspects of daily and ritual life in Aztec Mexico, including some that are still used today such as: in xochitl, in cuicatl—“flower” and “song,” respectively, meaning “poetry” or “wisdom.” Another example of a difrasismo is topco, petlacalco—“in the bag,” “in the box,” together meaning “a secret.” In cueitl, in huipilli—“the skirt,” “the blouse,” refers to “the sexual nature of women.” One of the most common and meaningful metaphorical doublets was in alt, in tepetl, which means “water” and “hill,” or “hill of water.” In the opening paragraphs of the Nican Mopohua we encounter a diversity of uses of the term including in atl in tepetl Mexico meaning “the city.” This is followed by a reference to “the altepetls all around,” meaning communities in the valley of Mexico. When Juan Diego descends Tepeyac, which is also an altepetl and walks into Mexico City it is stated that he “got inside the altepetl”Footnote 31 (i.e., entered into the Spanish settlement). The wider sense of altepetl as a term meaning social community appears near the end of the text after the bishop is stunned by Guadalupe's image on the tilma and moves it back out to the city. “There was movement in all the altepetls everywhere of people coming to see and marvel at her precious image.”Footnote 32
One group of scholars insists on the socio-political meaning of the term that referred to the indigenous social organization in the form of a city or town with a well-defined geographical and political organization. In other words, in the Nican Mopohua, some uses of altepetl meant a “city-state” like the new capital of New Spain with Juan de Zummaraga's palace at its center. Some scholars have insisted that this is the fundamental meaning of the word—a town or city state with a clear number of constituent parts (i.e., barrios or sections).Footnote 33
But there is also a cosmological meaning to altepetl, which refers to the Mesoamerican-wide belief that sacred hills housed community ancestors and patron gods who would dispense good or punishment to the local community. This is a strong belief in Mexico even today and it sheds light on the more complex cultural meanings of the apparition stories. As a wave of recent scholarship has shown, patron deities and revered ancestors dwelled within the altepetls and xochitepetls, or “flowery mountains” and controlled the powers of germination and dispensed the “hearts,” (spiritual essences) of agriculture, culture, humans, and animals. As Xaviar Noguez—a leading scholar of Tepeyacac and Guadalupe—writes about the patron deities who lived within the altepetl or xochitepetl,
This was the titular deity of a specific ethnic population, a group of immigrants, a city, a town, or even a neighborhood or ward. The patron god or divine ancestor (residing inside the altepetl) was both the creator and the protector of some large or small group of individuals. He guided his people on a pilgrimage and bestowed a promised land on them.… A pyramid with a temple at the top was built in his honor or he was worshiped on a hill that he had chosen as his residence.Footnote 34
The parallels between this indigenous conception of altepetl with its interior, fertilizing, protective patron or patroness and the Guadalupe of the Nican Mopohua are simply stunning. She resides or comes from within the hill, claims to be the patroness and protector of all the ethnic groups of New Spain, guides Juan Diego and eventually Juan de Zummaraga on local pilgrimages—Juan Diego to and fro between city and hill, and Juan Zummaraga out of the altepetl as city to the altepetl that is the space of the indigenous sacred hill. She absolutely insists that she be worshiped not in the altepetl of the city but on the altepetl where she has taken up her “residence.” What turns this story into a borderlands narrative is that her cult links the colonial city, the indigenous hill, and the territory in between into a ceremonial landscape. Today when pilgrims or tourists come to the monumental site of Guadalupe's shrine, they typically pay homage to both the image of the Virgin and the hill where she appeared. Pilgrims visit, at the bottom of the hill, the latest of five huge churches that have housed her image since the seventeenth century. Pilgrims enter a moving walkway (there are two of them) which carries them slowly beneath her beautiful image as she gazes down on them. Then, if they are physically able, the visitor repeats Juan Diego's ascent of the hill by climbing a stone stairway up to a small chapel, supposedly on the site where the Virgin first appeared to Juan Diego. In hushed and reverent tones, prayers are offered as pilgrims process around the shrine, gazing at paintings depicting the apparitions on the hill, Juan Diego's visit to the Bishop's palace, and her appearance on Juan Diego's tilma in the city.
…hurricane…
In urging our theological and religious studies to further deprovincialize by attending to the colonial history and asymmetrical hybridities and creativity of Latin America, we can rethink our historical and interpretive positions on race in the Americas. As I wrote elsewhere,
As the white/black discourse has become multilayered and commercialized, it has also become an agent of exclusion of the many emerging narratives of race mixture in the history of the United States, and the struggles, oppressions, cultural traditions and creative engagements of Latino peoples. The social and racial complexity and dynamism of black-red-white sexual interactions, in the hands of the mainstream media, is becoming less visible. We are moving beyond the color line and it is the Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Guatemalans and others who are the “moving beyond.”Footnote 35
The hybrid is crossing the color line and identity bridges are being built and crossed that lead to a compelling question spoken by the Puerto Rican word artist Mária Fernández [Mariposa], “What does it mean to live in between?”Footnote 36 If we want to deepen our understanding of how borderlands realities of race and race mixture in the Americas have been experienced and lived and are becoming more apparent in the United States as a result of immigration from these other Americas, we must face up to the history of sexuality and the productions of mestizaje and mulatez in the Americas.
I employ the passage with the phrase “biblical hurricane” from García Márquez's Cien Anos de Soledad because the word “hurricane,” which comes from the Caribbean Arawak hurakán and refers to both the storms and the storm god, hurakán, resonates with Africa and the Africanist presence in Latin America and Latino/a cultures. Hurricanes are often generated in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa and churn west toward Latin America, frequently cutting a swath through the Caribbean islands. Then they cross into or skirt Mexico and bring their threatening winds and waters into U.S. territory. This path reminds me of the “middle passage” of African peoples who came into the Americas, often through what is now Latin American territory, bringing their languages, gods, labor, suffering, and dreams. The combined evidence of two paintings and one chart will give us a sense that it is not only the future that is mestizo but the past as well. In what follows we shall examine “The Mulatto Gentlemen of Esmeraldas,”Footnote 37 a drawing of La Malinche (the translator for Cortes), and finally, a list of the castas, the racial types as defined in colonial Mexico and Peru.
Mulatto Gentlemen and their Clothes
The oldest surviving signed and dated painting from colonial South America is a group portrait of three Spanish-speaking Mulatto (African and Indian) males entitled “The Mulatto Gentlemen of Esmeraldas.” As a sign of his borderland status, the man in the middle, Don Francisco de Arobe, was the governor of a settlement on the western coast of Ecuador where 450 Christian Indians were ruled by Mulattos against whom they periodically rebelled. According to one commentary on the painting and related historical documents notes, “the portrait and the 1606 record show Don Francisco and his young companions as new people in a cultural sense—part African, part Indian, part Spanish Christian, and now American in their particular way, as social categories loosened and were reshaped on the margins of the Spanish empire.”Footnote 38 The picture, upon closer view, shows the newness and mixtures in which these men participated. The edges of their clothes (i.e., the lace collars and sleeves along with the satin and silk cloaks) identify them with Spanish style. But beneath each cloak each man
wears an Andean-style poncho made of European brocade like material. Underneath the poncho is a European style sleeved and buttoned shirt, with a fancy lecuguilla, or ruff.… In the portrait it is the golden ornaments piercing their faces and the necklaces of white seashells worn over the ponchos that distinguish them as men of the coast. These ornaments have a long tradition, there dating back to at least 500 B.C., as seen on Jama-Coaque and La Tolita ceramic figurines.Footnote 39
Another scholar has noted that their clothes are “nestled beneath flowing Chinese overgarments, which are, in turn, cut in a distinctly Andean fashion.” Footnote 40 In this case two “races” (African and Indian) and four cultural traditions (Indian, Spanish, Chinese, and African) are represented in this painting of human borderlands.
The racial and cultural complexity of this scene is enlarged in the widespread creation of castas, or people of “mixed race” who proliferated during the colonial period in many parts of Latin America but with special notice in Mexico, Peru, parts of Central America, and Brazil. In Mexico the master painter Miguel Cabrera who was himself a Mestizo living in Mexico City painted a fabulous set of castas portraits showing a mind-boggling range of racial mixtures. Unlike the United States, which today is still held in thrall by a black/white discourse (basically dishonest language about the history of race), these paintings show a very public recognition that races mixed, crossed boundaries, and became public forces of varying degrees of influence and power. Here is an extensive list of castas that illustrates the whirlwind and challenges of decipherments that race mixtures demanded in Latin America. The most simple version had eight categories of racial mixture, while some Spaniards established up to forty versions of sexual and ethnic complexities.
Spaniard and Indian produce a Mestizo
From Spaniard and Mestiza, Castiza
Spaniard and Castiza, produce Spaniard
Mestizo and Indian makes Coyote
Black and Spaniard makes Mulatto
Mulatto and Spaniard makes Morisco
Spaniard and Morisca makes Albino
Spaniard and Albino makes a Black-Return-Backwards
Black and Indian makes Wolf
Wolf and Indian makes Zambaiga
Zambaigo and Indian makes Albarazado
Albarazada and Indian makes Chamizo
Chamizo and Indian makes Cambuja
From Albarrado and Indian, a Cachimboreta is born
From Indian and Cambuja, a Wolf-Return-Backwards is born
Wolf-Return-Backwards and Indian makes Hold-Yourself-in-Mid-AirFootnote 41
If any list could challenge the tyranny of the black/white dichotomy that rules race discourse in the borderlands of the United States, it is this one.
La Malinche
The immense challenges of living in the borderlands of Mexico and the New World are symbolized in the life, mythology, and imagery of La Malinche, an indigenous woman at the crossroads of three cultures, Mayan, Aztec, and Spanish. She has become a multivalent symbol of the person who is placed in the middle of a contact zone, who straddles a cultural and linguistic borderland, and who somehow survives. The historical figure Malinche was a trilingual speaker born into an Aztec family at the beginning of the sixteenth century and later adopted into a Mayan-speaking community as a teenager. When Cortes discovered both her beauty and linguistic abilities, he took her as his aid and mistress and she became part of the bridge between Moctezuma and Cortes. La Malinche has become the subject of an enormous and still growing literature, both academic and literary, attempting to interpret her roles, cultural significance, and palimpsest nature.Footnote 42 Speaking of her subversive, borderlands role in the racial mixtures of Mexico, Sandra Cypess writes,
Perhaps no native American woman has been as implicated in this particular discourse as the much maligned “La Malinche,” Cortés's famous interpreter and lover. From nationalist Mexican rhetoric to twentieth-century Chicana feminist works, La Malinche, or Doña Marina, has consistently been dragged through the mud of rape, sexual promiscuity, treachery, treason, and dupery.Footnote 43
La Malinche, the indigenous woman who translated between Moctezuma and Cortes and who had a child with Cortes is seen here straddling the two worlds of the Aztecs and the Spaniards. From the Florentine Codex, book 12. After Paso y Troncoso.
The radical impurity of this women's reputation comes in part because the main sexual interactions among Spaniards and Indian women were informal and under the control of aggressive European males who initially saw indigenous (and African women) as the spoils of the wars of conquest. In many parts of Latin America, the conquest was really the conquest of women. What makes this a story about a sexual borderlands is that the liaisons—more often rapes than love affairs—upset a fundamental Spanish binary named the “Republica de los Espanoles” and the “Republica de los Indios.” When the mestizos and the mulattos appeared on the scene in growing numbers it was uncomfortably clear that a “new world” of sex and identity was being formed. In the accompanying image, we see the key player, La Malinche standing in the middle of representatives of the two republics. She is a “straddler” of this borderlands in linguistic and sexual terms. Karen Powers in her close study of sexuality in colonial Latin America illuminates the struggles that La Malinche and other women faced.
Whether they were forced into or chose these unions, these women also lived their lives between two worlds.… They straddled, painfully, the indigenous world of their family, ethnic, and cultural loyalties on the one hand and the Spanish world of their male partners, colonial oppressors, and mestizo children on the other.Footnote 44
Models Moved by Borderlands: Asymmetrical Hybridity
For some time now these combinations, contact zones, and mixtures have been interpreted through the model of “hybridity.” This model argues that ritual participants faced with different religious traditions, such as Catholicism and African or Indian traditions, “pick and choose” elements of each and create (i.e., hybridize) an emerging religious world view and practice that—in the words of Elizabeth Wilder Weismann—produces “something new and different from anything else in the world.”Footnote 45 I assent to this historical and dynamic view as articulated in a number of works. But my reading of both Mexican colonial “hybridities” and Mexican-American religious expressions leads me to insist on the persistence of an “asymmetrical hybridity.” By this I mean that encoded in, and sometimes concealed within, Latino religious expressions is the legacy of and protest against the devastating social, political, and economic exploitations and ideological abuses that founded and constructed the relationships between triumphant European church traditions and their lighter skinned representative and African and indigenous peoples, symbols, and practices which were under assault in the long formative exchanges between very different cultural traditions. In my view of “asymmetrical hybridity,” the productions of numerous Latin American religious practices that were “new and different from anything else in the world” were also living memorials to the ways local peoples remembered, (or were cued to remember when they wanted to forget), negotiated with and resisted socially degraded positions. When we participate in Dia de los Muertos or the anniversary of the apparition of the Virgen de Guadalupe there is more at work than creative hybridities or comfortable unions of the Spanish Virgen de Guadalupe with the traces of an Aztec goddess cult. These and many ritual practices are the work of active memory, of uncovering again the painful history of the contact zones, the colonial encounters, the wars of conquest, and the work of rebellion. This memory work shows people seeking access to the spiritual power of Spanish invaders while also reviving access to indigenous traditions (from Africa or the Americas) and creating new forms of religiosity. Embedded in some of these rites of passage is the memory of asymmetrical suffering as well as critical and creative responses to the following: the conquest and death of millions of Indians, the complex sexual and social forces that led to mestizaje and mullatez, the introduction of new diseases and the cultivation of myriad forms of social and physical suffering such as slavery. The asymmetries of conquest—with its many days of the dead and the assertion of colonial Mariology, among many others—are what are hybridized.
Deciphering the Borderlands We Are Living In
As scholars of people's worlds and rhythms of life we are, in part, like Aureliano in the biblical hurricane at the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude who is deciphering the instant in which he is living. In this essay I attempt to decipher our living in what I have called the “Brown Millennium”Footnote 46 and offer a hope, if not a prophecy, that we can decipher its borderlands and what is at stake for those who share in its tragic history before we become the fearful whirlwind that is already in the centers of some cities and elsewhere poised at our common horizon. As an historian of religions, it is my hope that we can learn and write a larger and more human history of the Americas that engages with all the aspects of our common borderlands.
During my public discussion with Samuel T. Huntington, I came to realize how far we have to go in learning about the long history of border crossings. One example will make the task clear. In his defense of the priority of the Anglo-Protestant culture, Professor Huntington gives ample attention to the variety of culinary metaphors depicting the nature of assimilation that has strengthened, in his view, American identity. He reviewed the metaphors used by scholars such as, the melting pot, salad, mixing bowl, weaving machine, pipeline, dumping ground, as well as his own, tomato soup. Or, better yet, “Anglo Protestant tomato soup.” He wants:
immigrants and their descendents to duly adopt the standard Anglo Saxon cultural patterns.… The culinary metaphor is an Anglo Protestant tomato soup to which immigration adds celery, croutons, spices, parsley and other ingredients that enrich and diversify the taste, but which are absorbed into what remains fundamentally tomato soup.Footnote 47
In my response I raised the importance of remembering who is picking tomatoes in this country. Moreover, the word tomato, a word Professor Huntington appears to think has an Anglo-Saxon origin, comes from the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, the word tomatl. The European Cortes and the Spaniards ate their first tomatl in Mexico. However, they did not know that tomatoes were originally cultivated in Peru over 3000 years ago and slowly migrated across geographical and political borders to Mexico where it got the name that we use today without even knowing that it is a Pre-Hispanic term. In fact the most handsome men in Aztec society were referred to as Iuhquin tlachictli, iuhquin tomatl, “Something smooth, something like a tomato.”
Spaniards took the tomato and its name to Europe where it crossed the borders into Italy. The Italians made it their own and called it the pomo doro “apple of gold.” Only much later does the tomato, as word and food, get to Anglo-Saxon lands, although it appears they did not learn much about the many ways the Italians had enriched its uses in food and art. The point is that Professor Huntington's metaphor at its origin is itself an example of transculturation with its roots in pre-Hispanic cultures though he seems completely unaware of the border crossings of his culinary choice. This is one reason I think of the borderlands not only in terms of place but as a perspective and lens through which to interpret and understand the dramatically changing religious, social, and cultural landscapes in which we are all living today. For even much of the food we eat and share—and the symbols that they represent—comes from the borderlands.
