In contrast to the notion that Anzaldúa maps a particular journey applicable only to other individual journeys, this shift from individual to collective perspective indicates that this critical mobility ideally enjoins others in its processes and perhaps achieves greater force through this intensification. It also practically recognizes that the transformations it enacts or foresees might exceed the individual frame, creating necessary collectivities. Her discussion here challenges exclusionary paradigms of nation, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality with the very terms that appear to authorize them, signaling a project of renewal that also requires resignification. Delgadillo, Spiritual Mestizaje, 224–28.
10. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 385–91.
11. Job 12:7–8, NRSV.
12. Wang, “‘My next call is to ICE’.”
13. Magness, “He ranted at Spanish speakers.”
14. Maduro, Maps for a Fiesta.
15. Eustáquio de Souza, “Geraldo Eustáquio de Souza” (my translation).
2
Why I’m Here
—Miguel A. De La Torre
José was a simple man who worked with his calloused hands. He built things, trying to make a living as a carpenter; but times were hard, and taxes were high. In spite of the foreign military occupation of his homeland, there simply was no time to become involved with any of those revolutionary groups doing maneuvers and hiding in the wilderness. He kept his head down and worked hard, barely keeping food on the table for his rapidly growing family. Although a newlywed for a couple of months, his wife María already gave birth to a child that wasn’t his, a healthy boy. On this particular night, José was scared. He ran through the sleeping town, silently making his way toward his makeshift home, praying and hoping he wasn’t too late. He had to save his family from certain death! He burst into his shack going straight to the sleeping mats on the dirt floor. “Despierta mi amor, wake up my love,” José told his wife as he gently shook her. “A messenger just warned me la milicia, the militia, will be coming for us. I fear we will disappear! Apúrate, hurry up, we must leave this moment for a safer land, far from the reaches of this brutal dictatorship.” There was no time to pack any belongings or personal mementoes, nor was there time to bid farewell to friends and family. In the middle of the night, literally a few steps before the National Guard, José took his small family into el exilio, the exile. They would come to a foreign country, wearing only the clothes on their backs. Even though they could not speak the language, nor understand the idiosyncrasies of the dominant culture, at least they were physically safe. Salvation for this poor family was found south of the border.16
Over two millenniums ago this family arrived in Egypt as political refugees, fleeing the tyrannical regime of Herod. Almost fifty-seven years ago my own father came home to his wife, my mother, with similar news. Because of his involvement with the former political regime, he was now marked for death by the newly installed government. If caught, he would surely face a firing squad. They gathered me, their six-month-old child, and headed north, arriving in this country literally with only the clothes on their backs. Like Jesús, I too was a child political refugee
The story of God’s people is the story of aliens. The stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph are the stories of aliens attempting to survive among a people not their own in a land they cannot claim. If they were living today, we would probably call them undocumented immigrants, or the more pejorative term: “illegal”. The people who came to be called Jews, are a people formed in the foreign land of Egypt. They become a nation while traversing the desert, having no land to claim as their own. They experienced exile in a far-off place called Babylon and disenfranchisement on their own terrain due to colonial military occupation by a foreign empire, Rome.
Throughout the biblical text we are reminded of God’s concern for the alien and the stranger who resides among us. Aliens and strangers in the Bible are those who have been victimized, oppressed, or enslaved by others; those who are vulnerable because they lack family connections or support; and those whose nationality or religion differs from the dominant culture. In the exodus story, God told the Israelites to welcome the stranger because “you were once aliens in the land of Egypt.” Ruth, a Moabite woman “clings to” her mother-in-law Naomi to provide her security in old age even though she could have returned to her own people. The Good Samaritan in Luke does not leave the alien on the side of the road, nor builds walls to avoid seeing his injuries; he takes social and economic risks to attend to the alien’s needs.
According to biblical scholar Leticia Guardiola-Sáenz, “Jesús live[s] between borders, in a hybrid space which is an experience similar to that of Hispanics/Latin Americans in the postcolonial and neocolonial era. [Jesús], the border-crosser, the traveler between cities and villages, between heaven and earth, between suffering and bliss, comes to redeem the border-crosser who refuses to conform to the limits and borders of a society that has ignored her voice, her body and the borders of her identity as Other.”17 Most border-crossers today act out of desperation; Jesús, theologically speaking, acted out of solidarity with the least of these. The biblical text reminds us that although divine, Jesús became human, assuming the condition of the alienated (Ph. 2:6–8). The incarnation’s radicalness is not that the Creator of the universe became human, but rather God chose to become poor, specifically a wandering migrant. This reveals a Jesús who assumes the role of the ultra-disenfranchised. Because God incarnated Godself among the marginalized, Jesús connotes a political ethics lost on those accustomed to the privilege of citizenship within the empire, missing the significance of Jesús the “illegal.”
Did Jesús cry himself to sleep as I did? Feeling the same shame of inferiority imposed by the dominant culture? Did he have to become the family translator, as I did, between a dominant culture who looked down with distain at parents not fluent in the lingua franca, witnessing a role reversal of having to learn from children about the wider world? And of course, the shame felt by the child-translator toward those parents for appearing less-than the dominant culture who masters the language; and yet simultaneously, the tremendous fear and burden of knowing a mistranslation can lead to precarious situations as some within the dominant culture seek an opportunity to defraud the migrants. For some of us who have been the intermediates between the dominant culture and our families, discover in Jesús a savior, a liberator who knows our anxieties and frustrations. But why was Jesús physically present in Egypt? While a link between the Jesús crossing the border into Egypt, and the Jesús crossing the border into the United States exists; I rather explore why Jesús crossed borders in the first place. To answer this question is to answer why I too crossed borders. Why am I here?
On June 21, 1960, I received the government’s affidavit—a toddler, too young to understand the letter’s importance. At the time my parents and I were living in a roach- and rat-infested one-room apartment in the slums of New York City, sharing one bathroom with the other tenants on the floor. Two months earlier, we arrived in this country with a tourist visa. The letter, citing Section 242 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, notified me deportation procedures were imminent; and I should therefore “self deport” in lieu of forced expatriation. Ironically, I found myself in the country directly responsible for my original exile from my homeland. Truthfully, I would have preferred to stay and live in my own country, among my own people, rooted in my own culture. And yet, when this life comes to an end, my bones will be interned in this
