A New Chapter
My Human Catechism, Theology, and Accepting Myself
My family and I recently uprooted our life from Guatemala to the US. This has given me way to many ideas, feelings, and time to reflect. As a result, I will be posting some scattered thoughts and reflections that come to mind for as long as they come to me. These reflections are my way to stay focused on my humanity amid a disorienting time. I hope they are helpful to you as they are for me to process.
I grew up in a family that instilled whiteness as a moral and life value. That is, being white, or having more of White than indigenous blood was very good and important. At home, I was told that I should be proud of not being Indigenous. On more than one occasion, I heard my mother say, "Be grateful you don't have a single indigenous hair on your head." However, as I grew up, I realized that this wasn't entirely true. And this made me carefully evaluate the messages I was hearing.
As I entered adolescence, I realized that there were identifying traits that made me a mixed-race person. My father had Indigenous features that revealed his ethnic origins. Likewise, my paternal grandmother had characteristics that showed a mix of Afro-Caribbean and indigenous. Her full lips, thick, flattened nose, and long forehead made her look like an Afro-Caribbean queen. When cancer attacked her body, many of those features became even more prominent.
My mother, on the other hand, came from a family that finds pride in its European roots. According to her, my great-aunts intentionally voiced their disagreement with my mother and father getting married. There was a mixture of racism and classism that became evident when they saw that my mother would marry a dark-skin man. In addition to that, the messages I heard from the larger Guatemalan society constantly portrayed being indigenous something bad. By the way, this is not in the past. Just a few years ago someone who used to be a good friend told me, after an indigenous man hit his car in traffic: “the army should have killed them all when they had a chance.”
For these reasons, one of the greatest and most difficult processes of my life has been recognizing myself as mixed-race/heritage, mestizo. In theory, it seems easy to accept that one comes from a mixture of blood, cultures, and many other things. However, it is an arduous task that entails a process of cultural, social, religious, and theological unlearning. On a cultural level, Guatemalans are taught that everything Indigenous is evil. Theologically, we were taught that European and North American Christianity is the salvation of the world, which implies losing much of who we are. Consequently, this thinking often marks Indigenous people and culture as evil, pagan, or impure. Therefore, everything from the North Atlantic is seen and accepted as good, clean, and civilized.1
On a social level, this leads to everyday interactions being plagued by classism, racism, and sexism. This happens because there is no culture in the world that has not been affected by White Christian supremacy. This ideology, results from a hermeneutic that justifies the domination of one group of people over another. We therefore apply a biblical interpretation that affirms the right of some to dominate others. Thus, we reinforce the idea that white is good and holy, and everything that is black, brown, or mixed race is impure.2
This is why accepting myself as mestizo has been a difficult, painful, and at the same time a liberating process. Seeing the image of God in my mestizo being means accepting and celebrating that which I have been taught to reject. Also, it involves celebrating the backgrounds and stories that make me who I am. Even those that feel shameful at times.
So, I hope the recognition of my personal mestizaje (mixed race) is an invitation to allow ourselves the freedom to have a mestizo (mixed), unruly, and irreverent theology, a theology that doesn't adhere to Western academic standards, or racial categories, but transcends them in community and love for our neighbors, creation, and God.
I write all this without passing condemnation on my parents or family. For, I have judged it already, and I seek redemption through seeing Christ in all things. I do so because it's important to articulate the healing process that my journey in life has entailed.
Today, I feel free to fully love my beliefs, who I am, and where I come from. Furthermore, my mestizaje is the starting point of a theology. It is the genesis of an irreverent and concomfortable theology that seeks to honor the different streams of blood, thought, and faith practices that shape the theological reflections I put on paper.
My human catechism is an impure theology, and this makes it incomplete. For, one should never say that any theological work is finished. Even without having all the answers, I feel calm and willing to share a rebellious, uncomfortable, and disruptive theology that rests in ambivalence and grayness, yet listens, walks, and creates with the most vulnerable of this world. A mestizo theology cannot be controlled or contained within traditional dogma. It evokes a conceptual hybridity that is impurely woven into the very notion of being mestizo.
I won't dwell on the traumas and violence of the mestizaje in our continent. However, it's worth mentioning that this is an important topic, as mestizaje is the result of a violent, bloody, and traumatic collision of cultures. I risk committing the sin of assuming that whoever reads these words has a basic understanding of the history of the American Continent, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. That is why the journey to become more human musn’t ignore that the idea of mestizaje has faced strong criticism in the social sciences, as in many spaces it meant the eradication of the Indigenous.
Even so, it is important to recognize that “taxonomies and labels belong to interconnected histories that link the personal to the collective and everyday practices to artistic and academic practices, which, in turn, connect Europe and the Andes”3 with Guatemala, Central America, the United States, and the rest of the world. To be more specific, I take full liberty in using the concept of mestizaje, with its successes and failures, to transgress previously established categories in theological work and the social and faith practices of my immediate communities.
There is more than one reason to use this term from our Latin American Spanish. The word mestizo comes from the Latin mecere, which has the connotation of moving, disturbing, and mixing by agitation. This word "refers to the disruption of the social order through mixing or combining with individuals outside the category to which one belongs.”4 So, by taking up this term with its historical, social, and racial implications, I am doing the same with theology.
My reflections, then, are an attempt to disrupt the theological order from which I come, and to which I currently belong. In other words, I am taking the risk of creating an impure, syncretic, and possibly weak theology in order to extend the invitation to a different way of being Christian in the current context of our continent. With this rambling. I am hoping to own the fact that I am in a foreign land, and that will change the context of my theology, yet it will keep its heart for the most vulnerable in the new context that I will get to know one day at a time.
La Cadena, Marisol De. “¿Son Los Mestizos Híbridos? Las Políticas Conceptuales de Las Identidades Andinas.” Universitas Humanistica, no. 61 (January 2006): 51–84.
Fernandez, Eleazar S. Reimagining the Human. St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press, 2004. p 140-42
La Cadena, p 54.
La Cadena, p. 59
Powerful and full of wisdom ✊🏼
My brother, this is amazing. Gracias. Can’t wait to talk about how the new ways of doing theology are taking shape in our communities and cities. You da man.