With her ear finely tuned to the nuances and prophetic utterances of Puerto Rican literature, Delgado hears Puerto Rican peoples’ yearning for freedom and for God. She knows well how the work of good artists anticipates the emerging future before the rest of us have a sense that a shift is underway. To respond to Delgado's work obliges me to foreground my own social location more specifically than simply identifying as a Latinx theologian. To engage her as a Chicana and Mexican American theologian encourages a self-reflexive positionality that takes not only the content of her contribution seriously but the form of it as well. As a Chicana, I recognize the sociopolitical, cultural, and economic colonization of the Mexican American people in the United States, and I am committed to our political and spiritual liberation. Similarly, I identify as Mexican American, as part of a people not all of whom share my political perspective and commitments. History, colonialism, and imagination each suggest spaces for conversation among Puerto Rican and Mexican American theologians.
History
History matters. Early theological works written from and for the Chicanx/Mexican American community often included an account of our history in the United States, with critical attention to overlooked sources. Critical history as a theological source figured more prominently in works written some decades ago.Footnote 16 Fewer recent theological works have foregrounded our history in a substantial manner.Footnote 17 Is it time to reframe how we, Chicanx/Mexican American theologians, write theology? Delgado's book calls attention to the dangers that abound with slippages into collective amnesia. Empire grows stronger, more brutal and more evil with every passing day. Vieques, as Delgado argues, served as a wake-up call for Puerto Ricans. Is not our own time issuing multiple wake-up calls to the Chicanx/Mexican American people? Indeed, public rhetoric in the last three years has become much more pointedly racist against Mexicans. While the US presidency has always come with a bully pulpit for its occupant, Trump, more brashly than any of his recent predecessors, regularly delights in sending out tweets that buoy white supremacists and provide much greater license for hate crimes. Trump has vilified Mexican immigrants, writing, “They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”Footnote 18 He has tweeted many times various versions of “I want nothing to do with Mexico other than to build an impenetrable WALL and stop them from ripping off U.S.”Footnote 19 He has advanced several lines of attack, most notably against the children of immigrants, separating them from their parents and ordering them to be detained in cages. These actions can only be described as inhumane, cruel, indefensible, and racist. Indeed, today hate crimes against people like me and my family, and against other Latinxs, escalate daily. Of this, much more could be said.
Does not this moment urge Chicanxs and/or Mexican American theologians to give history a more prominent place in theological meaning making? Without a doubt, there are many examples in US history of the othering of Mexicans. A particularly poignant example dates back to the Mexican-American War of 1846. In her notable work, Penn State historian Amy S. Greenberg identifies this conflict as the most wicked war the United States ever provoked.Footnote 20 The ideology driving the war effort, Manifest Destiny, was (and continues to be) a racial ideology targeting Mexicans and all other would-be critics of US imperial designs across the West. Then US president James K. Polk advanced this war and took pride in the recognition he enjoyed as the figure most responsible for engineering the triumph of Manifest Destiny. Polk had deep convictions about white American exceptionalism, an exceptionalism that was used to justify the taking of what are today California, Nevada, and Utah, as well as parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas—almost one-third of US territory. All of this land was Mexican territory before the war began. This war has the dubious distinction of having the highest casualty rate of any American war. Of all of the territories stolen, the state of my birth, New Mexico, was the last territory to become a state, in 1912. The US government refused to allow the New Mexico territory to become a state until the majority of the population living in the state was white. Widespread racism, codified in Manifest Destiny, led white Americans to believe that neither Mexicans nor Native Americans were deserving of their own land.Footnote 21 For eighty years, from 1848 to 1928, mobs lynched thousands of Mexican Americans in the Southwest, a largely forgotten history.Footnote 22 Yet, Mexican Americans today cannot transcend, much less transform, the limits that have been placed upon us, short of naming ourselves and our history. To know ourselves in relation to God demands no less. Moreover, a critical recovery of Mexican American history within theological discourse is utterly necessary, if our theologizing, our work, is to respond to the contemporary iteration of Manifest Destiny. Our history needs to ground and orient Chicanx/Mexican-American liberationist theology, or it simply cannot respond to the cries of our time.
Delgado observes that Puerto Rican history has been erased from the Puerto Rican collective consciousness; the same is true for the Chicanx/Mexican American people. As is frequently observed, “History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes.” History rhymes not only diachronically but also synchronically. Indeed, Delgado calls on each distinct Latinx community to recognize how history rhymes synchronically, and in the key of colonialism. Only such recognition enables us to resist the “divide and conquer” tactic employed by US power to advance colonialism.
Colonialism
Delgado's work issues a wake-up call to every Latinx group. She invites a consideration of what “has been circumscribed by our colonial relationship with the United States?” (11). To follow this question where it leads requires an openness to a shifting historical framework and a willingness to wander along the edges of the US imperial project. From a Chicanx/Mexican American vantage point, this means situating oneself in the borderlands where the US colonial project asserts itself most virulently. For decades, Chicanx literary artists, theorists, and historians have interrogated borderlands identity, while only a few Chicanx/Mexican American theologians have mined this rich vein. This body of work recognizes that in the Southwest many Chicanxs/Mexican Americans never “crossed the border.” The border crossed us. We became a colonized people in our own land, having had our land violently taken. In describing our experience of colonization at the dawn of the twenty-first century and in the wake of 9/11, Gloria Anzaldúa notes, “Chaotic disruptions, violence, and death catapult us into the Coyolxauhqui state of dissociation and fragmentation that characterizes our times.Footnote 23 Our collective shadow—made up of the destructive aspects, psychic wounds, and splits in our own culture—is aroused, and we are forced to confront it.”Footnote 24 Anzaldúa's work (along with that of Cherrie Moraga, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Martha Cotera, and Emma Perez, among many others) explores the US colonial project stretching back well over a century. This body of work underscores the import of Delgado's theological move to write a decolonial theology, and her assertion that “the reality of colonization lays bare the dream of decolonization; the colonized do not wish to remain so, deep in their souls. They dream of freedom, if only as a dream, and maintain that dream at all costs” (98). These contributions suggest that Chicanx/Mexican American theologians have much work ahead.
Chicanx/Mexican American theologians, and all Latinx theologians, write within the belly of the beast of the US colonial project, a project advanced by “divide and conquer” tactics. While writing as “Latinx” theologians has advanced our common project, this strategy has a soft underside, making us vulnerable to being pitted against one another and robbing us of the energy fueling our best theological work. If distinct Latinx groups continue to ignore their particular experience of being a colonized people, then our respective theological claims will lose their authority, their vitality, and, most importantly, their capacity to support belief in a God who works in and through the sinews of our political, cultural, social, and personal narratives. Beyond being pitted against one another, we must remember that “for women of color, home and homeland have not been safe places—our bodies are constantly targeted, trespassed, and violated. Poor white women and young Black and Latino men have never been safe in this country—a country that internally colonizes people of color, enforces women's domestication through violence, and continues the slow genocide of Native Americans.”Footnote 25 In short, without attention to our particular experience of colonization, we are more prone to being turned against other communities of color to disastrous effect for us all.
Imagination
The literary authors Delgado engages know that “good writing is not ultimately prescriptive, but it is more than simply descriptive” (63). Such writing opens up a liminal space for each of us to recreate ourselves and our world, and in so doing, these authors call their readers into greater freedom and into action. The space Delgado's literary artists open up is akin to Anzaldúa's notion of nepantla. Nepantla is “a psychological, liminal space between the way things had been and an unknown future. Nepantla is the space in-between, the locus and sign of transition. In nepantla we realize that realities clash, authority figures of the various groups demand contradictory commitments, and we and others have failed living up to idealized goals. We're caught in remolinos (vortexes), each with different, often contradictory forms of cognition, perspectives, worldviews, belief systems—all occupying the transitional nepantla space.”Footnote 26 Here again, Delgado's delving into her own Puerto Rican reality leads me back to my own, inviting me to imagine a different world. I turn again to Anzaldúa, who offers a compelling rendering of Coyolxauhqui as one who symbolizes “both the process of emotional psychical dismemberment, splitting body/mind/spirit/soul, and the creative work of putting all the pieces together in a new form, partially unconscious work done in the night by the light of the moon, a labor of re-visioning and remembering.”Footnote 27 Good literary work facilitates exactly this kind of transformation.
“I am troubled by the feeling of living in the ‘now’ of oppression and the ‘not yet’ of freedom” (180). The question of salvation resides within this very tension. Much of my own work has been in wrestling with the challenge presented by the radical difference between the world as it comes to us, often marked by evil, brokenness, despair, and injustice, and the world desired by a God who loves us lavishly, a world in which justice, love, and joy abound, in which all living beings flourish. The enormous gap separating these two extremes presents the greatest of theological challenges. As I have argued, we catch glimpses of salvation, whenever we act or witness responses that resist evil and affirm our fundamental interconnectedness. Greater freedom can be realized only when we affirm the spiritual unity that binds us to one another. Salvation while always personal is also always social.Footnote 28 Delgado's work suggests that in the practice of freedom we may discover what is salvific this side of the eschaton.
