Since June 1, 2018, the Puerto Rican community—island and diaspora—has been in a collective state of nervous anticipation of another hurricane season,Footnote 29 and most recently reminded of (as if we could ever forget) the devastation faced by so many, confirmed by a new official death toll of 2,975.Footnote 30 Nearly 3,000 of our gente perished during Hurricanes Irma and Maria, and in the profound neglect of their aftermath. The enormity of that fact cannot be overstated and underscores the necessity of shouting out—un grito duro—the importance of our lives with the belief that when the world ignores our cries, God hears us.
I am honored to have my book reflected upon by scholars whose work I respect and admire: María Teresa Dávila, Melissa Pagán, Nancy Pineda-Madrid, and Michael Lee. Their insights, reflections, and critique have given me much to consider to flesh out the nuances of a Puerto Rican decolonial theology; I offer my commentary in the order of the perspectives presented, lifting up the inflection points that continue our ongoing dialogue en conjunto.
Response to Dávila: Our Stories Matter
On August 11, 2018, I had the privilege of being invited to a performance of West Side Story at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, New York.Footnote 31 As I watched a 2018 dramatization of this 1957 musical, having deconstructed the lyrics of “America” at the 2017 meeting of the American Academy of Religion,Footnote 32 I became unexpectedly emotional. Why was there so much fascination with this story, told through the music, lyrics, and choreography of three men (four if you consider Shakespeare) who were not Puerto Rican? Is this story our own? Has it become our own by default? And is this the only story that the standing-room-only audience of predominantly white upstate New Yorkers will ever know of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans still, even now, in post–Hurricane Maria 2018?
As noted by Dávila, imaginations ran wild in the aftermath of the hurricane, as did mine as I watched the performance, and all were based on fear. The kind of imagination needed for the full flourishing of the Puerto Rican community cannot be based on fear but on a promise of that which extends beyond what the eyes can see. Indeed, imagination is a radical act of faith.Footnote 33 The imagination of our narrative matters: at a moment when narratives that perpetuate a lie and those that get to the truth are being contested, it matters who tells the story and to whose benefit the story is being told. Our stories may be the only way our faith in a decolonial future we cannot see is actualized.
I am particularly grateful for Dávila's keen perception around questions of gender and coloniality. I will leave the labeling of my work as mujerista theology to others, but I am indebted to the work of mujerista theologians for whom lo cotidiano—the everyday life experience—is the starting point for any theological discourse. I hint at this later in the book as I offer the mulatizaje of my Latina womanist leanings, paying closer attention to the contours of race that have been silenced and marginalized within Puerto Rican stories and histories. Our racial story must matter as a central element of our theologizing. As a Roman Catholic theologian, I take very seriously the critique offered by Bryan N. Massingale and M. Shawn Copeland that Roman Catholic theological discourse has not attended adequately to white supremacy and racial hierarchies and, in that lack, has perpetuated both in our Roman Catholic church and theology.Footnote 34
The story of conquest and colonization, as Dávila notes, is intimately tied up with gender. I agree wholeheartedly when she states that “the study of the gendered nature of coloniality and conquest reveals for us … that the turning into no ones of the colonial subject is not gender neutral, but bears the weight of the dynamics of gender violence, in their domestic, social, and political spheres.” The story of violence and the evangelization of the Americas has been told,Footnote 35 but its connection to gender is more recently being made apparent with the voices of feminist, womanist, and mujerista theologians/ethicists coming to the fore.Footnote 36 More work needs to be done to make this connection explicit, and I am heeding that call in a manuscript in progress on a decolonial Catholic sexual ethic, from the place and space of the “no one” as the best of witnesses.
The place of “no one and everyone at once” is echoed in a traditional bomba—an Afro–Puerto Rican music style—that I found myself singing in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria with my imagination running wild about loved ones in Puerto Rico: “Campo yo vivo triste / y cada día sufriendo más / Ay Dios, que será de mí / si no bailo esta bomba yo voy a morir.”Footnote 37 The being, survival, and salvation of the Puerto Rican community cannot be separated from the being, survival, and salvation of the land; by expressing oneself through the body, through dance, one is connected to the land and one's very existence. Thus, to theologize in a Puerto Rican decolonial key, post-Hurricane Maria, we must attend to the ways we can imagine gender, racial, and earth justice, aspiring toward, as Dávila notes, “the liberation of a mañana that is to come.”
Response to Pagán: Our Cries Matter
I dedicated A Puerto Rican Decolonial Theology “to all Boricúas—from every time and every place—who, in one way or another, have inspired me by living into freedom regardless of political status or personal circumstances, standing with beauty and grace when the world has said we are nothing more than colonial subjects. This book is my love letter to you” (vi). Pagán rightly notes that it is also a lament—un grito—that shouts to the ends of the earth on behalf of an enduring love for the Puerto Rican community. Her analysis of a “hermeneutics of el grito” referenced here and given fuller treatment in her powerful essay “Cultivating a Hermeneutics of El Grito in the Eye of the Storm” suggests the moral responsibility of the Puerto Rican community to
break through colonial ways of knowing that ground so much of our thinking about the human person in relation to one another and in relation to God. In the context of the indifference to suffering and violence produced at the colonial difference/indifference, as evidenced by the phenomenology of the cry, the past and present sufferings of our people must become the locus of our work as theologians, ethicists, and educators. Naming the importance of a hermeneutics of el grito reminds us of the history of … global coloniality that continue[s] to relegate subjects to a subhuman status. It challenges us to listen and recognize how our current categories inhibit rather than facilitate liberative possibilities.Footnote 38
Pagán's incisive analysis challenges me to articulate more clearly the centering of emancipation as a constitutive element of a Puerto Rican decolonial theology. It is not merely a semantic preference but one that emerges from my interpretation of how the liberation project within theology has become fused with the colonial project. In other words, since liberation theologies were first articulated, something has happened to the volume of what were once prophetic voices crying out in the wilderness. After the publication of many books on liberation theology, has our world become more liberated? Are our churches more attuned to the cries of the least of these? I would argue that the “liberation theologies” enshrined in institutions of church and academy have become the “current categories [that] inhibit rather than facilitate liberative possibilities.”Footnote 39 Even with the best of intentions, the theorizing of liberation has become disconnected from its praxis. My centering of emancipation with the logics of decoloniality is my humble effort to disrupt the narrative of theology by reclaiming the imaginaries of freedom from enslavement. Here, again, I am attending to the silences around racial hierarchies and white supremacy embedded in the logic of coloniality that emancipation language seeks to unearth.
I am also challenged by Pagán's question posed from the destructive floodwaters of Hurricane Maria. Using Ferré’s House on the Lagoon, Puerto Rico was razed and will never be as before; she asks, “I wonder what we collectively might be able to imagine for a new, decolonized future for Puerto Rico, ripe with freedom and love?” With almost 3,000 dead, vulture capitalists waiting in the wings to buy the island for pennies on the dollar,Footnote 40 and so many of our people forced to migrate, I too wonder what a new decolonized future will look like. This, in itself, is reason for ongoing lament. All I can say is that I have witnessed something remarkable: in the wake of this calamity, a collective imagination of Puerto Rican identity and hope is emerging in the collaborative efforts between the island and diasporic communities. There is a renewed recognition that we are one people and what we build will be based on our listening and attending to our own gritos. Something rises from the ashes, a resurrection moment that is not based on an external savior but on a belief in the power of God working with and through us to live into a future ripe with freedom and love. The praxis of our communal solidarity is what is being both imagined and realized in the space where the house on the lagoon once stood.
Response to Pineda-Madrid: Our History Matters
Nancy Pineda-Madrid asserts that “history, colonialism, and imagination each suggest spaces for conversation among Puerto Rican and Mexican American theologians.” I respond with an emphatic yes! There is no way this project could have been imagined and initiated without the work of Virgilio Elizondo, María Pilar Aquino, and so many others whom I claim as theological forbearers. Their theological insights, in addition to the stories of Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Rudolfo Anaya, illumined a path for me to excavate my own stories, learning that just because they were not readily available did not mean the stories did not exist. They needed to be drawn out from the silence and the shadows of forced amnesia.
Theological amnesia, fed by historical amnesia, has deadly consequences, as Pineda-Madrid so accurately notes. This was made excruciatingly clear to me this past April when I received a notice from a colleague announcing an invitation to a former Texas Ranger and current border consultant to offer a keynote address at Iona.Footnote 41 How was it that, in 2018, a Catholic college whose mission fosters “intellectual inquiry, community engagement, and an appreciation for diversity” would either not be aware of the fraught history of the Texas Rangers or, worse yet, not seem to care?Footnote 42 In my response, I noted my disappointment with the invitation; yet, hoping that the speaker's presence would provoke a teachable moment about the forgotten history of lynching perpetrated by the Texas Rangers and civilian vigilantes, I provided a link to a few resources that I thought would be helpful toward that end.Footnote 43 Unfortunately, that information was not provided to students (to my knowledge), and no other faculty came forward to share my concerns publicly.
If, as Pineda-Madrid states, “Puerto Rican history has been erased from the Puerto Rican collective consciousness[, and] the same is true for the Chicanx/Mexican American people,” I would contend that neither has ever made it to the collective consciousness of the dominant culture in the United States. As a result, many in this country are completely ignorant of how the current climate of xenophobic mania against our neighbors to the south has tremendous precedent, and they are equally ignorant of the manner in which this racism is woven into the fabric of the colonial project that is los Estados Unidos. As theologians, ethicists, and educators, using Pagán's phrase, we have a moral responsibility to know just as much about the histories of colonization experienced by others, or, as Pineda-Madrid warns, “we are more prone to being turned against other communities of color to disastrous effect for us all.”
Turning against each other comes in many forms, not the least of which is the negation of our colonized histories and the stories of our resistance. In the words of Oscar López Rivera, Puerto Rican independence activist and prisoner of thirty-five years, “spiritcide” is the killing of the imagination. He found a way to resist the attempt to kill his imaginative spirit by painting while imprisoned.Footnote 44 During an interview in October 2017, López Rivera was asked about the political status of Puerto Rico; he responded:
Well, I believe, as a Puerto Rican, that the majority of Puerto Ricans want to be Puerto Ricans. …I think that there are times … when people think, “Well, oh, we are blessed with the relationship with the United States.” But … the end result will not be that, we can see. … So I can anticipate that Puerto Ricans will not be better off by the annexation of the United States of Puerto Rico. I also know for a fact that once any nation or any people lose their identity, their culture, their language, their way of life, their lifestyles, that they are a little dehumanized. …I see a big, big, big problem if Puerto Rico is to be annexed. But I believe … the overwhelming majority of Puerto Rico wants to be Puerto Ricans.Footnote 45
If “salvation while always personal is also always social” (Pineda-Madrid), then it will have something to do with the ability to dream, to imagine, new ways of being in the world. And that new way of being in the world cannot be imagined without being in community and in communion with each other and our planet, knowing our histories and stories intimately as the way to both preserve and animate the spirit for its flourishing.
Response to Lee: Our Freedom Matters
“Though the Puerto Rican reality is complex and often difficult, we must find freedom in and among ourselves.”Footnote 46 The simplicity of this statement defies the contested relationship that all Puerto Ricans—island or diaspora—have with the discourse on political status. Arguments have raged in every Puerto Rican family I know, including my own, regarding the three political options that are typically placed before us—independence, statehood, commonwealth/status quo—as if these were the only possibilities available, and as if the Puerto Rican people had any real say in the matter.
Lee's reflection picks up on the ambiguities of the status question, although he notes that “there is a subtle thread running through the book that political independence is the only acceptable decolonial option.” If that thread is evident in the book, then I was unsuccessful in my very intentional effort not to succumb to the three-headed monster of the status question. In fact, my own straddling of the ambiguous space where Puerto Ricans are “everyone and no one at once” is even more pronounced since September 20, 2017. Indeed, the stories upon which this decolonial theology is grounded beg not to be forced into a corner. The works of Santiago and Ferré make this point most clearly: the ending of their stories leaves us yearning for greater finality and prescription, but they refuse to offer cheap satisfaction in this regard. Perhaps as women writers, they know better.
Here is where I found Morse to be helpful as an interlocutor. Similar to the way Karl Barth figured into the initial writings of James Cone, while acknowledging that engagement as far from perfect, Morse's methodology of “testing the spirits”—taking nothing at face value, especially our theological claims—found a useful place in my own thinking and as a corollary to the decolonial methodology of Mignolo, Grosfoguel, and others. As I wrote,
Morse's methodology—drawing out the rejected belief behind the accepted belief—parallels my own … of drawing out the silence behind the dominant speech, as well as the decolonial methodology of affirming “the epistemically disavowed colonial subjects” of Western modernity. … It maintains an element of suspicion toward tendencies to interpret the Christian tradition with “naïve dogmatism,” and a critical eye toward expectations to comply unquestioningly with such dogmatism, much like the colonial power in relation to its subjects. Both Morse's and Mignolo's hermeneutic urge us to take a second look at those elements of our belief systems that we've taken as universally true for all—or “zero-point epistemology” in Mignolo's words—in order to discover another side of that belief which has suppressed any and all challenges to its hegemony. (87–88)
I am most grateful for Lee's insight regarding trans and queer theologies as dialogue partners to advance a more robust Puerto Rican decolonial theology, as it challenges me to consider nonbinary thinking such as has been articulated by Marcella Althaus Reid and, more recently, Thelathia Nikki Young and Robyn Henderson Espinoza.Footnote 47 Again, my work in progress in the area of developing a decolonial Catholic sexual ethic seeks to expand upon these themes.
I am also challenged by Lee's assertion that the later work of Gustavo Gutiérrez offers a more thorough treatment of suffering and salvation with which to place in dialogue the narratives of Puerto Rican brokenness. I most certainly agree that we do not need any more broken bodies to find redemption, in the Puerto Rican community or anywhere. My hope is that this work proves to be a fertile point of departure for scholars such as Yara González Justiniano as she examines the realities of suffering and the practices of hope in Puerto Rico.Footnote 48
If, prior to Hurricanes Irma and Maria, this project fell short in terms of “substantial truth claims about the nature of and steps toward freedom” (Lee), it would be even further from that goal today. Truth be told, this Puerto Rican has very little to say prescriptively about the steps that need to be taken for freedom to be actualized. But I know this: our freedom will be actualized, in whatever political manifestation that takes, only when our stories, cries, and history are heard by our own Puerto Rican community, from within those spaces between “torture and resistance” of the Boricúa borderlands. “We might have to sit in the valley of the dry bones for a while before life can be breathed into them,”Footnote 49 but we do so while picking up the pieces ravaged by the storm, in solidarity with each other, and with faith that God will put her Spirit in us and we will live, and she will settle us in our own land.Footnote 50
