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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: Missiological Engagements
- Sprache: Englisch
Throughout the history of the Christian church, two narratives have constantly clashed: the imperial logic of Babel that builds towers and borders to seize control, versus the logic of Pentecost that empowers "glocal" missionaries of the kingdom life. To what extent are Westernized Christians today ready for the church of the Pentecost narrative? Are they equipped to do ministry in different cultural modes and to handle disruption and perplexity? What are Christians to make of the Holy Spirit's occasional encounters with cultures and religions of the Americas before the European conquest? Oscar García-Johnson explores a new grammar for the study of theology and mission in global Christianity, especially in Latin America and the Latinx "third spaces" in North America. With an interdisciplinary, "transoccidental," and narrative approach, Spirit Outside the Gate offers a constructive theology of mission for the church in global contexts. Building on the familiar missiological metaphor of "outside the gate" established by Orlando Costas, García-Johnson moves to recover important elements in ancestral traditions of the Americas, with an eye to discerning pneumatological continuity between the pre-Columbian and post-Columbian communities. He calls for a "rerouting of theology"—a realization that theology cannot make its home in Christendom but is a global creation that must come home to a church without borders. In this volume García-Johnson - considers pneumatological insights into de/postcolonial studies - traces independent epistemic contributions of the American Global South - shows how American indigenous, Afro-Latinx, and immigrant communities provide resources for a decolonial pneumatology - describes four transformations the American church must undergo to break free from colonial, modernist, and monocultural structuresSpirit Outside the Gate opens a path for a pneumatological missiology that can help the church act as a witness to the gospel message in a postmodern, postcolonial, and post-Christendom world. Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.
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SPIRIT OUTSIDE THE GATE
Decolonial Pneumatologies of the American Global South
For my grandchildren Emmanuel and Chloe:Their generational imagination and restlessness make me wishfor a theology that does not yet exist.
Contents
Preface
An Amorphous Journey in Transoccidental Studies
An impostor syndrome is as natural as any system of ideas that makes us experts on God. When we realize that, it puts our training in question and makes the inadequacy of our practice evident. When that form of ethno-racial tokenism is no longer tolerable, it requires immediate resolution and authentication.
My epistemic exodus within exile seeking for another way forward erupted as a nostalgic episode making me look south of the US border, to the Global South. Ideas circling around the vortex of “Third World” countries and interstitial spaces, awkwardly, did not let me leave home, my diasporan location in the States. Exodus within exile, I call it. Dizzy, unsteady, and unready, I arrived at a new intellectual horizon for my practice and theological imagination: Transoccidentality, if you will.
Let me begin by appropriating the biographical words of Olaf Stapledon, the British philosopher and science-fiction novelist, author of The Star Maker. In Jorge Luis Borges’s review of Stapledon’s contribution, he writes, “The review of his style, which advises an excess on abstract words, suggests that before writing literature he had read much philosophy and few novels or poems. In reference to his character and destiny, it is best to transcribe his own words.”1 Here blatantly I begin to usurp Stapledon’s biography: I am congenitally rough, protected (or spoiled) by capitalism. Only now I have begun to learn to self-develop, after half a century of work. My childhood lasted twenty-five years; it was shaped by the Chiquita Banana, the unknown town of San Pedro Sula (Honduras), an immigrant church in the San Fernando Valley, and an evangelical seminary in Pasadena, California. I planted churches, visited missions on three different continents, and for a decade led a denominational office comprising many congregations, just in time to flee from an imminent disaster.
As a professor of systematic theology, I learned the canonical texts, memorized the names of the classical heroes of the Western religion and the sacred history of a triumphant civilizing education disseminated by scholastic, mystical, and practical theologies. I taught passionately out of the fountain of my Western knowledge and my unrealized Latinx ministry experience for over a decade. An elite, middle-class-illustrated Latino, I purposed to educate immigrant pastors, second-generation Hispanic leaders, and the English-speaking community desiring like me to educate the disfranchised agrarian and urban Latinx population in America (the United States included). I taught in seminary, in the university, in my mission trips, in Bible institutes. But at the end I learned very little from my teaching.
My students, who were pastors and missionaries doing ministry mostly in the back alleys of urban America, taught me better. Their practical questions about ministry, global missions, culture, politics, society, family, lament and trauma, poverty and affluence, holy doctrines and holy heresies, were all questions of a context once mine and somehow lost in the process of education. Their questions were also once my own questions, the very reason for which I came to school to attain several degrees. And yet there I was, with four new church plants under my belt; a regional ministry giving leadership to over more than two hundred American Baptist churches (sixty Latinxs); an adjunct teaching post in one of the largest evangelical seminaries of the world; and teaching the laity on Bible, spirituality, and doctrine in a thriving Bible institute in Santa Ana. The realization of my intellectual condition of alienation came slowly after I had acquired my doctoral degree and began to fully engage with theological leadership.
Memories, after all, are sources of knowledge. Originally, I came to seminary because of a Latinx and ministry question. But this question gradually morphed into a different set of questions subsumed under a more universal, significant, and overarching body of knowledge, which arguably is to give an account of the classical questions of Christianity, the church, and the Christian witness. That is to say, the premise for this epistemic transformation (from the “particular” to the “universal”) is that by addressing the perennial questions of Western Christianity I could give answers to the temporary questions of Latinx Christianity. This subalternization of my particular quest for knowledge made me realize that I had become indeed an impostor to my own self and my own people: my teaching, preaching, evangelizing, counseling, healing gifts were all conduits by which my students were also barbarically civilized, by virtue of my own mimicking of the subversion I was exposed to during my educational process. I had become an expert on civilizing my own people, with a doctoral degree to prove it. Put bluntly, I was pedagogically handicapped. I was not able to teach my students. I could only teach them the subject of Western theology and its applicability to their context, however translated into their “barbaric” environments. Borrowing from Homi Bhabha, I had been participating in the barbaric transmission of culture with the rhetoric of civilization.2 I had been an impostor. I needed to migrate. I needed exodus in the midst of exile.
And so, back to usurping Stapledon’s biography more literally this time: “I woke up as a tired teenager at age [fifty]. Painfully, I am moving from a larval state into an amorphous and delayed adulthood.”3 I have two incurable passions: the theology that does not yet exist and the tragic condition of humanity tortured by barbaric globalism. After planting churches, leading a denominational office, and training ministers for eleven years, I reached the limits of my influence and theological vision, realizing that much of the problem of the lack of social engagement and holistic transformation in many Latinx churches of the American continent was not merely the lack of theological training, leadership, and economic resources. It was the recycling of theological systems, missiological paradigms, and ministry models that do little if anything to change the violent systems of life engulfing their communities. So I decided to explore fully the genealogy of such a predicament and moved more intentionally to the academic world with an agenda in mind that would require going beyond planting new churches into planting new ideas. Thinking about what scenario might best represent this transition in my academic life, I came to think of it as exodus in exile. The idea here is not two distinct and separate experiences and logics but one—an intersectional and simultaneous existential collage.
Exodus as a biblical narrative points to a journey where a people begin to gain identity after slavery, to subscribe to normative ways for living together under God’s law, land, language, and custom. Exile points to displacement, a place for losing identity and social stability and where one learns to live with interstitial angst for that which one thought to be permanent, defining, elevating—an angst heightened to the degree that human flourishing is rendered void of significance by the diasporan conditions that have reterritorialized one’s life in the land and the culture of the dominant other after one has been deprived of one’s homeland.
And yet, out of the piles of accumulated ambiguity and the valley of wounded humanity, like the dry bones in the book of Ezekiel, the Spirit speaks a breath of life causing flesh to heal the human imagination and hope to determine history for those for five centuries chained behind the gates of nonpersonhood, servility, coloniality, and modernity. The evocations of life, like cries of newborns, are untranscribing by the mechanism of modern logic but nonetheless too familiar to our ears: Transoccidentality, trans-Americanity, decolonial pneumatology, mestizo(a)logy—terms uncovered in my reawakening for the new ways of thinking discussed in this book. Readers will feel the power of these evocations when encountering a number of slashed and hyphenated terms in the following pages. Such is an inescapable task in the building of a new grammar and syntax proper to our Transoccidental discourse.
Acknowledgments
My first word of gratitude goes to Karla, my wife. A sojourner and critical thinker like me, she believes and participates in my vocation in many important ways—one of which is to assure that the conditions for research and writing are proper.
Next, I would like to acknowledge my intellectual teachers, José Martí and Orlando Costas, without whom I doubt this book would have come to mind the way it did. They represent a cloud of witnesses walking across two distinct and inexplicably separate pathways: Latin American studies and US Latinx theologies. I am grateful to the legacy of José Martí, whose imagination, words, and influence have given to the Americas so much to build on in spite of his own epistemic limitations. He is a quintessential Transoccidental thinker. Likewise, I am indebted to Orlando Costas, who has oriented my theological instincts with his subtle thinking and evangélica praxis. He is an inspiring Transoccidental theologian of sorts—at least that is how I am reintroducing him.
I am grateful as well to many colleagues from different traditions, backgrounds, and disciplines who have been instrumental in the making of this work. I must note, for instance, the remarkable hospitality of Catherine and Justo González, who hosted my wife and me in their residence while I was beginning to conceive of Spirit Outside the Gate. Also, a word of gratitude is due to Amos Yong for inviting me to write in the Missiological Engagement Series and, more importantly, for engaging with me in extravagant pneumatological conversations. In the same vein, a book of this sort with so many disciplinary intersections and epistemic transgressions requires me to acknowledge many colleagues who tutored me by way of formal and informal engagements: Miguel De La Torre, Willie Jennings, Orlando Espín, Tommy Givens, Mark Labberton, Hak Joon Lee, Johnny Ramirez-Johnson, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Robert Chao Romero, Kay Higuera Smith, and Peter Heltzel (and the Postcolonial Roundtable Group of the American Academy of Religion), Santiago Slabodsky, Daniel Carroll-Rodas, Eduardo Font, Jacqueline Hidalgo, Gregory Cuéllar, Love Secrest, Juan José Tamayo, Ruth Padilla DeBorst, and La Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana de Norte América, along with so many other esteemed colleagues.
I owe a debt of gratitude, as well, to many students who constantly reorient me to the global church and Latinx ministry: Centro Latino students in general, who keep me grounded in the realities of the immigrant church; Daniel Dama, who gave me the opportunity to relate to my West African kinship; Young Jun Seo, for showing me ways of how a Korean-born brother can embody what a Latinx decolonial pastor might look like; Sarah Agee Johnson, for witnessing to the importance of Original American languages in the practice of mission and critical thinking.
I wish to offer a sincere word of gratitude to the research assistants participating in this project at different times: the thoughtful Matthew Jones, the subversive Esteban Miranda, the prolific Annabel Leyba, the curious Josué Caramés, and the meticulous Marcos Canales.
I am very much grateful, as well, to my team at the Center for the Study of Hispanic Church and Community at Fuller Theological Seminary: Carlos Cevallos, Marcos Canales, and Claudia Díaz. I cannot imagine a better administrative team to support me during the journey of writing this manuscript.
I owe a special word of gratitude to friends who gave me social as well as intellectual energy while writing this manuscript: Oscar and Lexa Merlo, Rob Johnston and Cathy Barsotti, Juan and Ruth Martinez, Mark and Nina Branson, Bill and Grace Dyrness, Samuel and Noemí Pagán.
I would like to acknowledge, as well, Joel Green, who supported and encouraged me as dean of the School of Theology at Fuller Seminary while I was writing this book. Joel’s theological leadership made it possible for me to successfully multitask, doing research and writing while doing administration in times of change.
Finally, I wish to thank Jon Boyd for the critical and creative conversations we entertained for some time on matters related to Spirit Outside the Gate and the global church. His editorial and theological vision made a difference, for sure. In addition, a note of gratitude goes to the entire InterVarsity Press team for their excellent work.
Introduction
This book is the second of a trilogy intended to build a new grammar and field in the study of theology and mission in global Christianity—Transoccidentality and Latinx Global Studies.1 The first work, Theology Without Borders, introduces a conversation between a Latino theologian from the Global South trained in the United States and an Anglo-American theologian from the North trained in Europe. Both of them, grounded in the church and with missionary backgrounds, acknowledged the problem of theology per se as geopolitics of knowledge. That is, theological studies and its corresponding establishments in the Westernized world are faced with a significant contradiction: the teaching, curriculum, and paradigmatic core of their theological disciplines continue to be centered on the West while the Christian church has gone global and is going native; Christianity is no longer predominantly a Western religion; and the most rapid growth today is outside of the West.
In this regard William Dyrness and I argued that the place in which theology is formed matters because language, culture, histories, and traditions are never neutral carriers of ideas and geopolitical designs; they always shape what they receive according to the values and inclinations of that place and its people.2 So, what we have come to know as “Christian theology” in the Westernized world is nothing more than a local Western history with a global design, to borrow words from Walter Mignolo.3
Having already identified the fundamental Western legacy in theology and mission as “local/geographical epistemology,” in this second book I venture to create the conditions for theological “diversality” as a global contribution from the American Global South.4 But how does one determine the places, times, sources, and persons that should be the dialogical partners informing our theological imaginary?
IMAGINARY
A “social imaginary” is a set of values, cultural norms, and institutions that are generally shared by a social group and that shape how members of that group interact with themselves and others. Imaginaries determine how one perceives socisety and one’s place in it, and yet many people are unaware just how much their ideas about the world are informed and constrained by the particular social imaginary they inhabit. Initially a sociological concept, the “social imaginary” has become an important part of philosophical and theological disciplines aimed at promoting critical self-understanding and intercultural discourse. This book hopes to contribute to the development of theologically rich imaginaries that are concretely rooted in historical and geographic spaces while remaining fluid, intersectional, incarnational, and oriented toward hope.
Although I approximated these lines of thinking in my first book, The Mestizo/a Community of the Spirit,5 I recently came to think of the necessary elements for this theological diversality as a global contribution in my chapter titled “In Search of Indigenous Pneumatologies in the Americas” in The Spirit Over the Earth.6 Interacting with Robert Johnston’s book God’s Wider Presence, I asked, what are we Christians to make of God’s occasional encounters with cultures and religions of the Americas before the European conquest and beyond their Occidentalized socioreligious representations, provided that God’s wider revelatory presence has also been present in the Americas? This is an epistemic inquiry that, by virtue of its research focus, places “thinking in the colonial difference.” Hence, it takes for granted the geopolitics of knowledge of both the West and the Americas.
THE COLONIAL DIFFERENCE
The “colonial difference” signifies the dissimilarities between colonized and colonizing countries that are not merely cultural but also emerge from histories of exploitation and asymmetrical power, influencing the production of knowledge. The colonial difference is founded in the European colonizers’ belief in their essential superiority to the “others” they encountered during their conquests, an intrinsic difference that justified Western domination over every sphere of life. Doing theology “in the colonial difference” means centering indigenous practices, values, and ideas that were targeted for eradication by colonizers, exploring ways of writing/thinking/practicing theology that would begin deconstructing embedded power imbalances, and establishing decolonial methodologies.
So far, I have taken care of the how, where, and when. Transoccidentality is proposed as a framing device that places thinking, belief, and practice in the colonial difference and that, by virtue of its transmodern philosophical-cultural vision that negates the negations of Western modernity/coloniality (Enrique Dussel), seeks to recover sources and bodies of knowledge in pre-Hispanic America and beyond any canonical imagination of the West trapped within modernity/coloniality/Occidentalism. Due to my particular focus, the reader will often see that I am constantly circumventing Western theological sources trapped in modernity/coloniality/Occidentalism and instead opting for indigenous sources as well as those sources from the West and the Majority World deemed appropriate and epistemically fitted to my project, however unsystematic, heterodox, or marginal they might look to the Occidental eye.
As the reader might realize, the point here is not to comply with the scholarly norm of the West but to explore other ways to expose God’s activity within creation. This takes us to the who of this work—namely, the Spirit of God, whom I hold to be a communal-incarnate-dialogical Spirit (Amos Yong); the Wild Child of the Trinity (Zaida Maldonado Pérez); the Decolonial Healer of the wounded lands, cultures, and peoples of the colonized South and minoritized populations of the North. Readers who are competent in the Spanish language might find it resourceful to go through Juan José Tamayo, Teologías del Sur: El Giro Descolonizador as they digest the arguments and consequences of this work.7 While Tamayo registers the type of religious and epistemic shift I allude to across world Christianity, he does not provide a theological economy on which this shift can build a future constructive trajectory. This is something I attempt to do by means of decolonial pneumatologies.
This book is organized in five parts and twelve chapters. As with much literature, symmetry and exactness are not intended principles in my work, so chapters do not contain even numbers of pages. Nor does a given chapter provide sufficient content and argumentation apart from correlation with previous and following chapters’ respective conceptualizations. It follows that arguments will not attend to a strict linear and progressive logic ending in a panacea that subsumes absolute truth. Subaltern communities sharing colonial-modern-imperial subjugations in the American Global South cannot be addressed with these Enlightenment categorical novelties. That having been said, I make all possible effort to provide the reader with a coherent theological account on the multiple issues, conditions, utopias, and dystopias shaping our subalternized/colonized/modernized world by means of new concepts, categories, and paradigms. Since I am introducing a good number of new categories, concepts, and reasoning patterns, it will not be unusual for readers to feel overwhelmed at moments. So I make use of repetition to facilitate processing this new grammar and syntax. Consequently, readers will find sentences and sometimes paragraphs repeated in various chapters to help them recognize key concepts and arguments as they build understanding on the material.
Part one (chaps. 1–3) intends to narrate more than analyze problems and possible solutions in the American Global South and its eclipsed geopolitical identity. By interlacing local narratives with a continental matrix of power (coloniality of power) I show an organic picture of how economics, politics, religion, subjectivity, and geography have had concrete manifestations in the lives of individuals, families, countries, continents, and Christian traditions. The section concludes with Transoccidentality as an epistemic matrix whose function is to place thinking, belief, and practice in the colonial difference with a Christian imaginary.
Part two (chaps. 4–5), without pretending to be an exhaustive effort, names and analyzes the main epistemic problems of the American Global South. It reviews eight paradigms that are arguably the most influential framing devices orienting theological analysis in the Global South, more particularly, in the context of Latin America. It also finds these paradigms insufficient to address the five-centuries-old problems vested in imperiality/coloniality/modernity. Opting for another paradigm, the epistemic decolonial shift, it focuses on four epistemic gates—endemic to the identity and public life of representative Christian churches and movements of the American Global South—that need to be named, conceptually unlocked, and materially undone.
Part 3 (chaps. 6–7) begins to trace independent epistemic contributions in the American Global South. It begins the reconstructive work by pointing to the metaphor of “Outside the Gate” to characterize a stream of Latinx evangelical intellectuals whose thinking and mission practice relate to the missiological agenda of Orlando Costas and his memorable book Christ Outside the Gate: Mission Beyond Christendom.8 Hoping to expand beyond Costas, it actually argues in favor of decolonial pneumatology (Spirit Outside the Gate) rather than mission Christology as the basis for a more proper understanding of the continuity of the Christian experience in the American Global South, a continuous revelatory presence of God since pre-Hispanic America through trans-Americanity (i.e., beyond colonized/modernized America).
Part four (chaps. 8–10) gives birth to a series of pneumatological constructions, namely, the account of a decolonial (Transoccidental) pneumatology of the South. After offering a rerouting theological itinerary in the American Global South on the basis of a pneumatological difference, it goes on to argue for (re)traditioning the Spirit. This suggests a new interpretative horizon for understanding the Christian experience in the context of the people of the South and begins to discern indigenous theological patterns proper to such context, which I call the canonical imagination of the Americas. The next move is then to show how a number of American traditioning communities (Original Americans, Afro-Latinxs, immigrants of the South) provide re-Sources for a decolonial pneumatology. Given that the colonial imagination of the Americas is wounded (chap. 7), I then argue in favor of the Spirit as the Decolonial Healer.
Part five (chaps. 11–12) recapitulates creatively the contributions so far developed as theological diversality (diasporan narratology, analytics of the South, decolonial pneumatology) and provides a perspective on global designs as embedded in predominant theological discourse, church institutions, and the Christian university. Chapter twelve, in particular, proposes an outline for a Church Without Borders, a pneumatological ecclesiology of social decolonial engagement operating as an alternative space for survival, resistance, and world-system9 reformation. This vision of the church is indeed a vision of the Church of the Healing Decolonial Spirit, a church whose identity is no longer constrained by the powers of imperiality/coloniality/modernity/Occidentalism but by the power of the Healing Spirit of the Pentecost. Indeed, this chapter forms the basis for the third book in the trilogy.
Two thoughts as a last word of introduction. One, if I were intending to write a theological monograph in line with Western theology and exclusively for Western Christianity, sections one through three could be easily charged as prolegomena, leaving very little as pneumatology proper. But I am not. To be sure, placing knowledge in the colonial difference begins with the epistemic difference as ground zero, which, by the way, is a constitutive part of my decolonial pneumatology simply because all we know of imperiality/coloniality/modernity/Occidentalism (the whole colonial matrix of power) in the American Global South has been inseparable from theological content since day one of the Conquest.
Two, I pray the reader would carefully and patiently consider the arguments presented in this work without quickly falling in the temptation of placing this work under the “radicalist or anti-Western” category. If that moment presents itself, I recommend the reader to jump to chapter eleven, where I clarify what I am not arguing for, and then come back and continue reading. Thus let me anticipate that I will not be claiming here that Western theology, missiology, and culture at large are intrinsically and utterly colonizing, oppressive, and evil and that Western missionaries, broadly speaking, did not make a presentation of Jesus Christ and the gospel of salvation to the Original Americans and other communities of the American Global South, as best as they understood it. But I will be arguing that as long as Western theology, missiology, and Christian practice operate under a modern/colonial/Occidentalizing logic informing the global designs that have built and maintained their five-century (status quo) hegemony, its epistemic, hermeneutical, and ethical languages will remained compromised. Hence, the global production of colonizing, oppressive, and evil conditions affecting subaltern communities sharing modern/colonial/imperial subjugations will continue to go unchallenged and undone by theology, missiology, and cultural emancipatory initiatives of the West.
PART I
The Narrative
The American Global South: Challenges and Visions
We are present at every cardinal point because our geography is the geography of injustice and oppression. We are not everyone; we are those who do not resign themselves to sacrifice and therefore resist. We have dignity. We are all indigenous peoples because we are where we have always been, before we had owners, masters, or bosses, or because we are where we were taken against our will and where owners, masters, or bosses were imposed on us. They want to impose on us the fear of having a boss and the fear of not having a boss, so that we may not imagine ourselves without fear. We resist. We are widely diverse human beings united by the idea that the understanding of the world is much larger than the Western understanding of the world. We believe that the transformation of the world may also occur in ways not foreseen by the global North. We are animals and plants, biodiversity and water, earth and Pachamama, ancestors and future generations—whose suffering appears less in the news than the suffering of humans but is closely linked to theirs, even though they may be unaware of it. . . .
Who are we? We are the global South, that large set of creations and creatures that has been sacrificed to the infinite voracity of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy.
When the Cuban American theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz thought of her home city, La Habana, Cuba, she described it as “a city that inhabits me,” in spite of the fact that she had lived in the United States of America most of her life.1 Some might think of this description as nostalgic and a sign of cultural inadaptability. To the diasporan citizen from the American Global South, however, this existential paradox is much more than mere nostalgia; it is a form of geopolitics of knowledge, a border geography for thinking, sensing, believing, imagining, and acting. A diasporan such as Isasi-Díaz lives in displacement, which is commonly experienced as an external exile (in relationship to her homeland) and an internal exile (in relationship to her home base, the place in which she has lived most of her life, yet which does not embrace her as a native).2
Let us make no mistake here, such exilic self-consciousness brings with it not just ambiguity and disorientation but also imaginaries and decolonial tropes with the potential to reframe world captivities that are not usually available to those living at the center of wealth, intellectual privilege, and racial hegemony. Exilic, diasporan, borderline narratologies can be used, Isasi-Díaz reminds us, as heuristic devices in our different disciplines.3 The epistemic advantage they enjoy as diasporan thinkers is that the very conditions making up their context are a constant reminder of the “dangerous memories” conveyed in life under the violent, unjust, and cruel regime of global marginalizing designs.
As does Isasi-Díaz, I too have biographies that interconnect with hemispheric histories and can be used as heuristic devices. By interlacing local narratives with a continental matrix of power, I intend to show an organic picture of how economics, politics, religion, subjectivity, and geography have had concrete manifestations in the lives of individuals, families, countries, continents, and Christian traditions in the American Global South. The three chapters in part one seek to narrate more than analyze problems and possible solutions in the American Global South. As I have suggested, narratives are good sources for developing a nomenclature for the realities of the worlds from which those narratives emerge. Hence, after generating a number of metaphors, categories, and framing venues in this part, I will, in chapters four and five, name and analyze the main epistemic problems in the American Global South—those of American Christendom.
1
A Child of the Occident
When . . . Jehovah distributed the world
United Fruit Inc.
reserved . . .
America’s sweet waist.
It rebaptized [them]
The “Banana Republics.”
PABLO NERUDA, “CANTO GENERAL” (1950)
A CHIQUITA BANANA KID
I am from the “sweet waist” of America: Honduras, a country marked in history as the quintessential expression of the banana republic. Its Atlantic alluvial coasts attracted lovers that made her land fit for kings for many years. Acres of humid and fertile land, dressed by hundreds of cabbages, in a young Central American republic, playing the home of kings—the North Carolina novelist O. Henry made a name for himself with this story, right at the crossing of the nineteenth century. O. Henry’s satirical narrative Cabbages and Kings, in whose pages Honduras is referred to as the Banana Republic, became a classic widely read in schools across the United States of America (and their international schools) in the twentieth century.1
“The 300 miles of adventurous coast has scarcely known for hundreds of years whom rightly to call its master,” relates O. Henry. “Gentleman adventurers throng the waiting rooms of its rulers with proposals for railroad and concessions.” A century after, we know who won the favor of Honduran rulers, the United Fruit Company, Inc., later known as Chiquita Banana.
Settled in a territory as vast as 650,000 acres of the most productive land along the Atlantic coast of Honduras by the first quarter of the twentieth century, the United Fruit Company began the process of building national “progress.” That is how we, most of the Honduran population, thought of the United Fruit Company for most of the twentieth century. The national craving for modernizing Honduras with the help of the Chiquita Banana became the project of a century. As the North American company applied its architectural and entrepreneurial geniuses to its key infrastructures—ports, railroads, state-of-the-art hotels, hospitals, administrative buildings, grocery stores, country clubs with golf courses, sport centers, cinemas, tennis courts, and the like—sparks of hope invaded the public imagination. Needless to say, the spacious and luxurious real estate, where middle- to upper-management employees lived, fueled the public appetite for “tomorrowland”; a living condition for the middle class second only to that of the architects of this society, the United States of America itself.
All commodities and living upgrades developed by the United Fruit Company were strategically located in specific geographical areas where its main operations took place. Given the splendor of progress in these regions in contrast to the average Honduran neighborhood, locals came to baptize these areas La Zona Americana (the American zone). Likewise, the United Fruit Company became nationally known as La Compañía (the Company). The political leverage that La Compañía enjoyed with the Honduran executive power and other public agencies was unprecedented.2 The United Fruit Company was given the opportunity to sport a new capitalistic economy, sustained by an upper-middle-class managerial society that correspondingly exemplified a particular US cultural and patriotic lifestyle.
I grew up in La Zona Americana for most of my early childhood and adolescence. My father worked for the United Fruit Company as middle management. My mother, a white lady of British American descent, kept our home in line with such status. Both of my parents played golf, but my mom was exceptional. She won several tournaments, both locally and nationally. Golf was the family sport, an extravagant pastime in a “Third World country.” Memories about life in La Zona Americana have made a significant impression on me—La Zona Americana, tomorrowland, in one of the most impoverished countries of the American continent; a geography of progress lived as the American dream, protecting me from the foes of national poverty and underdevelopment; a flare of success on my head among losers; as if Jehovah, in the words of Neruda, had distributed this piece of land, this juicy waist of my country, to La Compañía; a beautiful life, a good life, the ultimate truth.3 I grew up to be a Chiquita Banana kid.
A WESTERN CATHOLIC
Like most Latin Americans, I was raised Roman Catholic, the national religious identity of Honduras. During my youth I attended different Franciscan elementary schools. Though not very active in the church and its liturgical celebrations, “being Catholic” was how we identified as a family. School taught us well who our founders were. Roman Catholicism founded the Western religious imagination of the Americas at the time of the “discovery of the New World.”4 Such religious imagination cemented three centuries of colonial life and shaped what we know as Latin America and the Caribbean today. The mission of the Roman Catholic tradition has a deep, broad, and lasting history in the American continent. I practiced what the Cuban American Catholic theologian Orlando Espín calls “the daily religion of western Catholics.”5 Popularly speaking, I was a Roman Catholic in my own way, but a Catholic nonetheless.
THE PROTESTANT ENCHANTMENT
As a young man, I attended a Protestant junior high/high school by the name Instituto Departamental Evangelico Anna Dorothea Bechtold, locally known as la misión evangélica (the evangelical mission). The school was founded in 1939 by Miss Anna D. Bechtold, an Anglo-American missionary from the Reformed church. Part of its purpose was to evangelize children and youth in the community and provide them with what she thought to be a more holistic and modern education than that available in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. This, of course, accounts for one of the goals of the North American mission enterprise in Latin America, after the first Protestant congress in Latin America (Panamá 1916): “to evangelize upper-to-middle classes.”6
I was then introduced to some of the main tenets of Protestantism/evangelicalism: preaching, Reformed theology and doctrine, hymnology, personal evangelism, and so forth. These Protestant artifacts were well established by means of yearly Bible courses, weekly chapels, and special evangelistic events entertaining Anglo-American missionaries who visited us every year. By the age of fifteen I converted to the Bible—I had developed a taste for studying Scripture, but never committed to any local church or professed an evangelical faith during my high school years. I thought of myself as a Roman Catholic with an evangelical (Reformed) approach to the Bible. The remarkable verses of the Brazilian Presbyterian theologian Rubem Alves capture part of what I understand to be the enchantment of Protestantism during those years:
Protestantism is part of my body, my dream, my nightmare,
something which I love, something which I hate. . . .
What I have to offer are not clear and distinct ideas, but dreams: I invite you to see Protestantism from a non-Protestant point of view: to enjoy Protestantism from within a non-Protestant bubble. . . .
I invite you to dream. . . .
Every dream is a prayer. . . .
Protestantism is, for me, a dream. I love it because, when I am possessed by its symbols, I feel that my body becomes lighter, it almost flies.
I love the Calvinist fear of all kinds of idolatry.
Idolatry—when someone says that God has been captured, when the Wind is locked in a tomb and the dream becomes commandment. Prisoners—traditions, this is how things must be done, orthodoxies, truths, institutions, books, this nation under God, we know better. . . .
I love the Calvinist fear of all kind of idolatry: because then we have to march ahead with empty hands. And our eyes become gentler. . . .
I love the Calvinist care for creation. The world—what a beautiful dream—is a garden, and we all are gardeners. . . .
And I love the beauty of prophetic solitude. . . .
You know; these are not facts; they are not pieces of the Protestant tradition or institutions. They are visions, symbols of the objects of our desire, names for nostalgias. . . .
If Protestantism is still young . . .
If it still has the power to seduce . . .
If it is strong enough to possess bodies and make them dance, fly, and fight . . .
It all depends on its power to make other religions and traditions dream. Maybe they will not convert to Protestantism. But it is sure they will become lighter.7
A PENTECOSTAL CONVERT
Having become “lighter” in my Catholic faith by the Protestant enchantment of my high school years, I encountered another Protestant path that made me into an evangelical at last. This happened not in my homeland but immediately after I migrated to the United States of America. My first worship experience in the United States took place in a public park in Southern California, where I witnessed more than four hundred people gather enthusiastically, as a church, to praise the Lord and preach the gospel in Spanish without fear of public perception. This was an immigrant church founded by a Brazilian missionary sent to “America” by the Assemblies of God of São Paulo to work among US Latinxs. The young church would meet, temporarily, at that public park for Sunday worship services because it had grown beyond expectation; its hosting church, an Anglo-American Assemblies of God congregation, would not house them anymore.
During weekdays members met in houses to study the Bible and share the gospel with their neighbors. This unplanned strategy, like the persecutions of early Christians in the book of Acts, promoted growth. The worship experience (el culto pentecostal) became so significant to me that I became fully immersed in the life of the church: discipleship, baptisms, and leadership training, in a Pentecostal fashion. Many attractive aspects of the Christian faith I had observed in previous experiences came together in the Pentecostal worship service. The words of the renowned Pentecostal leader Dr. Jesse Miranda frame it better: “The character of Pentecostalism rests on its distinctive spiritual and theological nature, that is, its fervent worship, its living Scripture, its theological parameters, and its festive singing.”8 In retrospect, I think that what unifies everything, cognitively speaking, for a member of the Pentecostal church, is indeed el culto (the worship service). This is why the Pentecostal theologian and ethicist Eldin Villafañe argues that “el culto is the implicit theology of the Pentecostal believer. . . . It is the locus theologicus.” In short, “el culto is the theology, and the theology is el culto.”9 I claimed, then, to be a born-again Christian, with a fervent faith being perpetually renewed by the Pentecostal worship service. It goes without saying that my worldview was fenced by Bible knowledge, personal holiness, personal evangelism, and church service. Christian fellowship, though holding together every aspect of church life, was never formally emphasized, and yet it is such sisterhood and brotherhood that, to me, stands out more than anything else when I think about it.
LOCUS THEOLOGICUS
This is an increasingly common Latin phrase in theological studies that refers to the place or context from which one does theology and recognizes the activity of God. It has come to function as shorthand for the cultural, geographic, and communal environment that shapes one’s theological ideas and practices, an important part of any theological work that needs to be acknowledged. This should not be confused with the plural loci theologici, which refers to classical topics of study within theology.
THE AMERICAN BAPTISTOIKOUMENĒ
Never losing its Pentecostal character, the Latina Pentecostal church I was a member of transitioned into the American Baptist Churches of the United States—allegedly one of the most diverse Protestant denominations in the nation then. This transition brought into the congregational life the impetus of formal theological training, fellowship with other congregations, and the possibility of conducting missions overseas. As a result, my pastoral ministry and academic training developed in relationship with the American Baptist tradition. “I believe in a Christocentric Baptist identity,” I wrote in the ordination document when applying for ordination. I added, “the very source of our ‘being Baptist’; the point of origin around which we gravitate; the ontological and metaphysical space that gives us room to: discuss and disagree with each other, sing and preach differently and in different languages, associate and distance ourselves on matters of political, cultural, theological, liturgical, affairs.” In retrospect, the American Baptist experience has expanded my Catholic-Reformed-Pentecostal base by piercing clear and solid confessional borders that give the impression of totalizing identities, confessions, and lines of authorities based on top-down/past-to-present hierarchies. Yet the appreciation for diversity and an ecumenical attitude toward other believers are two of the distinctive contributions I have received from the American Baptist experience. The former requires us to develop a level of dogmatic, cultural, and gender self-awareness while learning to negotiate a common space for communion and mission. The latter requires us to educate ourselves about the other while acknowledging our own ideological presuppositions and theological inclinations.
A child of the Occident, indeed I am: a Chiquita Banana kid, with British Amerindian blood, raised by the Roman Catholics, enchanted by the Reformed tradition, converted by the Pentecostals, and diversified by the American Baptists. Along the way, I learned to obey the pope, look up to the white European civilization, believe in Calvin and the Reformers, lose myself into the Pentecostal culto (and hate the pope), and act civilly when facing nasty church politics for the sake of communion and missions, while being polite when relating to other Christian traditions. In short, I have been civilized multiple times, at many layers of my subconscious, by different modes of Eurocentered epistemologies in order to function well within the religious establishment of the West. My Occidentality is what I am, not merely what I do or something to deny. I am at peace with the fact that my Occidentality is part of myself. I have enjoyed Plato’s Socratic method, Augustine’s analogical rationality, Aquinas’s synthetic reasoning, Calvin’s renovating theological imagination, Schleiermacher’s daring liberalism, Barth and Bonhoeffer’s disruptive theologies, the Niebuhr brothers’ cultural-political realisms, Bosch’s critical missiology—and the list goes on, back and forth, in a seemingly inescapable vortex of Western canons. But if this is all I am or ought to be, then I am a child without history—as I will explain in the next chapter.
2
A Child Without History
¿Seremos entregados a los bárbaros fieros?
¿Tantos millones de hombres hablaremos inglés?
¿Ya no hay nobles hidalgos ni bravos caballeros?
¿Callaremos ahora para llorar después?
RUBÉN DARÍO, “LOS CISNES” (1905)
Are we to be handed over to the fierce barbarians?
Would so many millions of people speak English?
Are there no more honorable
nobles or brave knights?
Are we to keep quiet now to cry later?
(PERSONAL TRANSLATION)
My Occidentality, I have come to realize, is also non-Western. This realization enables a critical approach when thinking, believing, sensing, and acting. The moment one identifies, locates, names, conceptualizes, and narrates ideas, experiences, events, rationalities, and so forth, a hermeneutical horizon—a stand where one may position oneself in relationship to everything and everybody else’s affirmations and negations of oneself—emerges. This interpretative horizon, once discovered and critically applied, helps the interpreter to discern negated phenomena by interrogating affirmations that tend to dissimulate such phenomena. It is not uncommon for marginal subjects, reflecting out of their peripheral location, to find in affirmed Western narratives traces of their own invisibilized identity, although these traces are distorted images and are dialectically dependent (binaries). This is nothing new to Europe. For instance, in the second half of the seventeenth century, while living in Holland somehow in exile, the Jewish philosopher Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza realized a paradoxical axiom that informed his contributions forever: omnis determinatio est negatio (every affirmation is a negation).1 This type of paradoxical logic sheds light on the processes that conceal truth, goodness, and beauty by means of formulations that project regional and particular ideas and narratives as universal, normative, and absolute truths.
This methodological insight is very difficult to grasp unless one has been directly exposed to some level of oppression, persecution, and criticism—which usually results in social, religious, or political displacement. The great Jewish rationalist of the seventeenth century in Europe, Spinoza, of course, would try to rationalize his way into his freeing dialectic, in contrast to the reductionist dialectic he faced in his time. But having escaped the Spanish Inquisition as a child and having been excommunicated from his synagogue as a young adult and threatened by the Orangist-Calvinist faction as an adult surely helped him realize, firsthand, the negations embedded in the normative politics of the rationalities (or irrationalities) affirmed in his immediate context—which, by the way, worked against his freedom to philosophize.2 Spinoza’s impossible project ambitioned a freeing rationality of the whole (nature and humankind) as an alternative to the normative philosophies and theologies that, in his view, inconsistently reduced and disintegrated the different modes of existence and ordering life (metaphysics and ethics).3
In the case of the Americas, we can trace a history of affirmations—with an implicit binary logic—that portrays a particular idea of “America.” Here, this idea appears as a continent encountered, subsumed, and fabricated by a Western imagination that exalts Occidental ways over and above the other ways original to the Americas. But as Spinoza realized, omnis determinatio est negatio.
In a foundational work in the fields of anthropology, history, and global studies titled Europe and the People without History: Geography, States, Empires, Eric Wolf defies long-standing premises informing these disciplines by focusing on the European transformations as a function of Europe’s interconnections with other parts of the world during its expansive history.4 Social sciences in general, and anthropology in particular, were struck by Wolf’s findings:
The social scientist’s model of distinct and separate systems, and of a timeless “precontact” ethnographic present, does not adequately depict the situation before European expansion; much less can it comprehend the worldwide system of links that would be created by that expansion.5
By looking at “the world in 1400, before Europe achieved worldwide dominance,” Wolf “discusses theoretical constructs to grasp features of capitalism and modes that preceded it, turning to European expansion and the nations that extended the global sway.”6 Wolf follows the search for wealth on other continents and observes the impact that emerging capitalism and the Industrial Revolution had on the rest of the world—a condition that supplied the resources and the working-class people that had to migrate between continents.7 Wolf’s approach to global history, intertwined with political geographies and global economies, helped him demonstrate that some “histories” are overemphasized while others, particularly those of the colonial subjects, are undermined to the point of anonymity. Wolf argues that the interaction and relationship of continents, people, and natural resources cause history to belong to all participants. This is an important thesis: there is no European emancipation without intercontinental interaction.
DE/POSTCOLONIALITY
Postcoloniality is without doubt a contested approach both in theory and practice. Nevertheless, its swift worldwide dissemination and decolonial appetite is undeniable. The way I use the term de/postcolonial in this work is anthological and also programmatic. On the one hand, it recognizes a shared ethical-epistemic shift affecting disciplinary approaches, fields, methodologies, and liberative agendas that reflect on the various effects of coloniality, imperiality, and subalternity worldwide. The concept “postcolonial” serves the purpose of marking the intended theoretical disruption and rejection of the colonial regime and its rhetorical ramifications on all aspects of experiencing, knowing, acting, and imagining human life, social contract, and our relationship to the cosmos. On the other hand, the enunciation of this shift takes different shapes depending on the geopolitics of knowledge evoked by particular communal histories sharing common colonial-modern-imperial subjugations. For instance, postcolonial studies initially focused on the relationship of empire, culture, and literature in the backdrop of British colonialism (Edward Said, Hommi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak). But soon enough, it nuanced its focus to other forms of coloniality, imperiality, and subalternity, all of which related to multiple forms of modernities and thematizations worldwide.a In the context of the American Global South, one of the most provocative and attractive enunciations of the “postcolonial disruption” is decoloniality (see chap. 4). Using the term de/postcolonial makes a statement in favor of a broad postcolonial approach that is shared and yet a deep epistemic evocation, historico-cultural hermeneutics, and sociopolitical decolonial agenda that is necessary and not found in “majority” postcolonial discourses.
aSee, for instance, Pramod K. Nayar., ed., Postcolonial Studies: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).
Walter Mignolo, an Argentinian semiologist and prominent de/postcolonial theorist, building on Wolf’s findings and independent research as applied to the Americas, makes the following claim, which I quote in length:
From the sixteenth-century Spanish missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas to G. W. F. Hegel in the nineteenth century, and from Karl Marx to the twentieth-century British historian A. J. Toynbee, all we can read (or see in maps) about the place of the Americas in the world order is historically located from a European perspective that passes as universal. Certainly, every one of these authors acknowledged that there is a world, and people, outside Europe. Indeed, both people and continents outside Europe were overly present as “objects,” but they were absent as subjects and, in a way, out of history. They were, in other words, subjects whose perspectives did not count. Eric Wolf’s famous book title [Europe and the] People without History, became a metaphor to describe this epistemic power differential. By “people without history,” Wolf did not mean that there were people in the world who did not have memories and records of their past, which would be an absolutely absurd claim. He meant that, according to the regional concept of history as defined by the Western world from ancient Greece to twentieth-century France, every society that did not have alphabetic writing or wrote in a language other than the six imperial languages of modern Europe did not have history. In this view, History is a privilege of European modernity and in order to have History you have to let yourself be colonized, which means allowing yourself, willingly or not, to be subsumed by a perspective of history, life, knowledge, economy, subjectivity, family, religion, etc. that is modeled on the history of modern Europe, and that has now been adopted, with little difference, as the official model of the US. Perspectives from coloniality, however, emerge out of the conditions of the “colonial wound,” the feeling of inferiority imposed on human beings who do not fit the predetermined model in Euro-American narratives.8
Mignolo’s epistemic insights and consequences for rethinking autonomous historiography in the American Global South will be dealt with in the next chapters.9 For now, suffice it to say that Mignolo points toward autonomous thought that aims at decoding and exposing the scientific-historiographic tactics used to represent cultures, peoples, geographies, and world-systems in play in the Americas—all in disconnection with the Euro–North American narrative of modern progress and universality. In the logic of Wolf and Mignolo, for instance, Europe’s illustrious Enlightenment is possible because of America’s colonial darker history. Both histories count, are interlaced, and should be known as such rather than as autonomous (isolated) phenomena.
Although, technically speaking, the historical period known as colonialism ended when the American republics gained political independence from their European colonial powers in the nineteenth century, a matrix of power and control remained and morphed into the form of a “logic of coloniality” on the continent.10 Along with Western modernity and the rise of global capitalism, the logic of coloniality has succeeded by dissimulating local histories with its globalizing designs, adversely affecting the natural progress of most of the nations of the American continent south of the United States.11
My autobiographical fragments illustrate the “uneven development” of Latin American nations, rendering unequal conditions for the average citizen and privileges for the elite. “The elite” here refers to the so-called enlightened letrados (lettered elites) in Latin America. The letrados represent a modernized individual (typically male) who has achieved a “higher” status and culture compared to the average Latin American citizen, by way of his exposure to the European–North American educational system, cultural ethos, and politico-economic views. Broadly speaking, the birth of the Latin American nation was marked by the rise of the enlightened letrados whose ideological agenda was nurtured by republicanism, liberalism, and rationalism that has affected both ends of the conservative-liberal spectrum.12
For decades, the Latin American elites would send their youth to Europe and the United States for education and to gain a Western pedigree in order to come back and take control of the economic, political, educational, and cultural power structures in their corresponding countries. This reality helps explain why we find, in most Latin American countries, a few selected areas that resemble the “European or American way,” which would not exist as such if these sectors were not sustained by local letrados. In comparison, most other sectors making up the national demographic of the Latin American nation appear deprived, dangerous, and underdeveloped. This internal “uneven development” in Latin America is usually the basis for tourism, entrepreneurship, politics, and missions.
Applied to my own narrative, while I have personally succeeded at coping with the normative ways and challenges of the West (enlightened letrado), I nevertheless find myself failing to cope with current “Latin American” ways that do not conform to the “American” way. For instance, I feel safer travelling with my US passport than I do with my Honduran passport, except when traveling to Cuba or the Middle East. When walking by an impoverished neighborhood in San Salvador, I am afraid of being assaulted or killed by a gang member, a burglar, or a policeman. I distrust shopping at local businesses in Medellín, unless of course they show me a familiar “American” face (Visa, MasterCard, American Express).
As a Western Christian, I have grown used to this (American) continental differential. I take it for granted as I preach, teach, do mission, or research. When traveling to “Third World” countries, the sense of contribution could be annoying; the personal belief that one is going the extra mile, in part because one feels unsafe, afraid, or distrustful of such environments while doing the Lord’s work. When this happens, the continental differential becomes the mission indicator. More often than not, I may engage in missions in such contexts and never ask the hard questions: Why is this continental differential in place? Who have been the main contributors to this differential? What would it take for this differential to even out? But then again, as an enlightened letrado, an evangelical child subsumed in global capitalism to function well within the Western global systems that control the Majority World, a child without history I have become.
3
The Transoccidental Imagination
Christian Theologies and Missions Within Trans-Americanity
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes.
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
To-morrow
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen”
Then.
Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed,—
I, too, am America.
LANGSTON HUGHES, “I, TOO”
Yo también canto América
Soy el hermano oscuro.
Me hacen comer en la cocina
Cuando llegan visitas.
Pero me río,
Y como bien,
Y me pongo fuerte
Mañana
Me sentaré a la mesa
Cuando lleguen visitas.
Nadie se animará
A decirme
“Vete a la cocina”
Entonces.
Además, verán lo hermoso que soy
Y tendrán vergüenza—
Yo también soy América.
SPANISH VERSION BY JORGE LUIS BORGES, MISCELÁNEA
When the “most original and representative of African American writers”1 and the Argentinian “international phenomenon, father of postmodernist literature,”2 meet, then the other America sings: “I, too, sing . . . I, too, am America.” This song carries the lyrics of the children without history of the American continent.
In the midst of a white-male-dominated US-American history, a song that finds the concealed beauty of the other America subsists: darker, restricted to the kitchen, and yet festive and hopeful, a brother-and-sister gated by the whitening of truth, good, and beauty.3 This song is not about African Americans in the United States only, so thinks Jorge Luis Borges, one of the fathers of Latin American literature. Langston Hughes and Borges met at Berlin’s Folk Festival in the 1960s.4 But Borges’s interest in Hughes’s lyrics is not about Berlin or Europe; it is about America otherwise conceived. Both artists were clearly connected to particular Western traditions and yet were able to transcend them through their artistic representations—hence their universal appeal.
NUESTRA AMÉRICA
José Martí’s “Nuestra América” (Our America) is a dialectical and aspirational concept that presupposes an occupied America. Martí’s immortal essay “Nuestra América” is a canonical text in the fields of Latin American and Latinx studies. It was composed during exile, from New York in 1891, in the backdrop of the first Pan-American Conference (1889, 1890 in Washington, DC) and the foundation of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Cuban Revolutionary Party, 1892), which was established to secure the political independence of Cuba and help bring about the independence of Puerto Rico from Spanish rule. “Our America” constitutes a critique to centuries of colonial political but also epistemic occupation. Said differently, the power of this concept is that it coveys the conviction that Marti’s and ours is still “European America.” Hence, “Nuestra América” is really the evocation for America otherwise conceived, the “other America” in need of being uncovered, recovered, and rebuilt.
Hughes’s “art was firmly rooted in race pride and race feeling even as he cherished his freedom as an artist” and carried a leftist impulse in a hostile segregationist world.5 He was both a “nationalist” but also a “cosmopolitanist.”6
