Resources

For Gloria Anzaldúa, the borderlands are rooted in US-Mexico geopolitics in which the border wall is both a socializing project and an everyday policing structure. Although Anzaldua’s activist hermeneutic of the borderlands has a state of transcendence in view, it remains politically grounded given that her experience with borderlands is inextricably tied to a US-inflicted social wound on the people and the landscape. Here, political activism functions as a spiritual exercise, which, for Anzaldúa, was achieved through the power of the pen. In essence, her recourse to writing as a political act stemmed from her understanding of the power that archives have in defining identities and shaping social realities. In this sense, the border wall functions as an archive of US imperialism, racism, and anti-immigrant sentiments. Through her writings, therefore, she aims to trespass on this archive, or more specifically cross the border wall by offering a counter-reading of the history, culture, and beauty of ethnic Mexicans. The notion of border wall as both politics and an archive speaks to how borders and walls in general are the result of a cultural value system and shared social beliefs about the Other. The southern border walls separating the US from Mexico are a reality based on the widespread belief that ethnic Mexicans are entirely inferior and hence more prone to criminality. The genealogy of such myths can be traced to the mid-nineteenth century and the expansionist ideology of Anglo-American Manifest Destiny. This ideology relied heavily on a theology of providence, which, in turn, made the Anglo Protestant Church its most ideal ambassador. Thus, any trespassing on the archives that legitimate the current southern border wall must be attentive to the North American Church and its scientific and literal uses of scripture. For those churches acting more as agents of the state, crossing the border wall is considered not just a crime against the state but even more a sin against God. This conflation of state agenda and divine will is also operative in chaplaincy services provided in US immigration detention facilities, to the extent that convicted border crossers are led to accept detention and deportation as part of their Christian duty. In the US-Mexico borderlands, border-crossing points to a transgressive act; yet for an activist hermeneutic of the borderlands, this act of transgression can be harnessed in a methodological way, especially as it pertains to the interpretation of scripture and its interpreters. Just as Anzaldúas’ notion of borderlands helps us to reframe the hermeneutical enterprise as an awareness of and interchange with otherness, taking up border-crossing as a decolonizing reading strategy cannot avoid the US-Mexico border writings of Américo Paredes. Because Paredes’s border-crossing strategy operates primarily as a response to US expansion over Mexico’s northern territory, it is attuned to not only “border wall as archive” but also to “border wall as a colonizing discourse.” When applied to an activist hermeneutic of the borderlands, border-crossing as a strategy for reading scripture implies a transdisciplinary engagement with the biblical text and its interpreters. Although crossing and converging multiple-theoretical discourses is essential, the lives of everyday people in the borderlands attunes our social justice gaze toward the material and spiritual suffering of people rather than ideas alone. As Paredes reveals in his discursive border-crossings, the lived experiences of border people often fall out of view in the professional theoretical literature and hence in the classroom. The cultural values and rules of self-making that govern disciplinary boundaries tend to dismiss the cultural productions of the colonized Other, arguing that they lack critical-thinking skills, leadership instincts, and refined aesthetics. Crossing over the borders that regulate the dominant hermeneutical enterprise with the cultural archive of those wounded by US border walls is not only a transgressive move but more importantly a liberating strategy for minoritized communities of faith. Their lived experiences with empire, violence, and forced migration serve as a vital commentary to biblical texts that bear witness to some of the same wounds. Here the lived commentary of border people and the human traces in the biblical text interact in kinship ways, from common themes to the postcolonial traumatic condition. By transgressing the boundaries of the dominant hermeneutical enterprise in this way, readers expose the synthetic nature of various Western scientific methods and their inability to deliver on their positivistic promises. Also, the lived commentary of border people emerges with increased value within the professional literature, which, in turn, may lead to their revaluation in the social justice realm.

I’m teaching about race more and more these days. That wasn’t my plan. My training is in ancient Greek philosophy and I used to love teaching Aristotle and Plato. But things changed. Ten years ago, the ancient thinkers were great at helping the first-year students at my small Catholic college in the Northeast reflect on the world, society, and themselves. I can’t get it to work anymore. Because my first-years don’t read very well, the ancient writers are increasingly inaccessible to them. And they keep requesting more readings by people of color, women, and people who identify as LGBTQ. This befuddled me for years. I wasn’t assigned a single reading by a person of color in my philosophy grad school program, the only women we read were commentators, and all LGBTQ writers we studied were closeted, at least in their writings. None of this bothered me. I was interested in ideas, not people! Three things changed. First, I realized that marginalized people added different ideas to the conversation. They stressed different issues, and they challenged shared assumptions. Second, my students did better work when I assigned a more diverse set of readings. Third, our students of color began asking us to teach students more about race. They politely didn’t add that white faculty members like me should learn some stuff about race too, but it was implied. All this took on new urgency with the rise and power of the Black Lives Matter movement. I realized that to make sense of the world and their own role in it, our students need to understand race better, and they need to get better at talking about it without getting defensive or shutting down. And of course, I need to get better at it too. But how do I teach anything connected to race in a responsible manner when I know so little myself? This stumped me for a long time. I had trouble finding readings that felt right to me. And when I came up with something, I remembered that including only one thing by an author of color is tokenism, a sin possibly worse than an all-white syllabus. And then I was paralyzed again. I eventually decided to live with tokenism and to start small and simple: I just added Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to my first-year gen ed class, combining it with Plato’s Crito to create a unit on civil disobedience and nonviolence. Once I felt comfortable teaching King, I gradually added other materials: Malcolm X’s “Ballot or the Bullet.” Selections from his Autobiography. Veena Cabreros-Sud’s “Kicking ass.” This semester, I added King’s arguments for nonviolence. Next semester, I might add a discussion on anger or a chapter by James Cone on nonviolence and Christianity. And I’m hunting around for a good video on the civil rights movement. I still feel like an imposter teaching this unit, especially when pedagogy requires me to speak as Malcolm X (I sometimes worry that there are secret videos). But I also know that it’s usually one of the most effective units in the class. Students who have seemed bored are suddenly interested. My (very few) black students get a chance to show off because unlike most of my white students, they usually know something about Malcolm X. Students bring up connections to the Black Lives Matter movement, and we try to think through what has changed and what remains the same. I still don’t know enough. My course could be diverse in a better way. Right now, all the black authors are talking about race, they are in a single unit, and they are almost all men. It’s a work in progress. But most of my white students have never heard of Malcolm X or a sit-in. What I do is much better than nothing and I learn a bit more each time I teach it. Perfectionism is the enemy here. It usually is. It’s OK to start small. Add a single piece. Don’t worry about how it fits into the course as a whole – students usually don’t see the overall structure anyway. Try and see how it goes. Next time, do a little more, do it a little better, or try something different. Learn. Grow. *Watch for two additional blogs in this series in December and January.   Resources Cabreros-Sud, Veena. “Kicking ass.” In To be real, edited by Rebecca Walker. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. Cone, James. Martin and Malcolm in America. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992. Cone, James. God of the oppressed. New York, Seabury Press, 1975. (See especially Chapter 9: Liberation and the Christian Ethic.”) hooks, bell. “Killing rage: Militant resistance.” In Killing rage: Ending racism. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. King, Martin Luther, Jr. I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World. New York, HarperCollins, 1986. (In addition to “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” see also chapter 15: “Nonviolence,” and 18: “Where Do We Go from Here?”) Mantena, Karuna. “Showdown for Nonviolence: The Theory and Practice of Nonviolent Politics.” In To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Srinivasan, Amia. “In Defence of Anger.” Four Thought, BBC Radio 4, 2014. X, Malcolm. “Ballot or the Bullet.”1964. (Transcript here and audio here.)