Toward a North American Indigenized Pastoral Theology
Dr. Marlene Mayra Ferreras presents an adaptation of her 2023 HTI Book Prize lecture
Rigo 23, Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program, 2009-present (ongoing), exhibited as part of Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas, (April 7 - August 18, 2019). Photo courtesy Queens Museum, credit Hai Zhang.
EDITORIAL NOTE
During the June 2024 HTI Professional Development Conference at The Princeton Theological Seminary, 2023 HTI Book Prize winner Dr. Marlene Mayra Ferreras presented a talk about her book, Insurrectionist Wisdoms: Toward a North American Indigenized Pastoral Theology (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). In conjunction with the OP Talks podcast conversation between Dr. Neomi De Anda and Dr. Ferreras, HTI Open Plaza is honored to feature an adaptation of Dr. Ferreras’ presentation.
Footnotes and image captions appear on hover.
“It’s my name that appears on the book’s cover, which is a bit deceiving. Research and writing are a social act. I wrote with and among a community that I spent time with, that surrounded me: laughing, crying, sharing meal-time conversations and all these relationships contributed to the writing.”
–Dr. Marlene Mayra Ferreras, from the original talk
INSURRECTIONIST WISDOMS
Photo: Marlene M. Ferreras
Pastoral theology increasingly focuses on death-producing sociopolitical and socioeconomic structures and the care of persons-in-community living within these structures. Simultaneously, literature in the field more steadily addresses the issue of neoliberal capitalism’s effects on people’s psycho-social-spiritual suffering. However, intercultural approaches to pastoral care and counseling privilege male experience while feminist-womanist approaches to pastoral care focus on white and black women’s experience. The critical ethnographic research I present in Insurrectionist Wisdoms fills the gap by offering a description of working-class Maya mexicanas suffering in the context of Christian theology’s complicity with neoliberal economics and multinational corporations. These assaults on women’s cultural heritage and wisdom threaten to distort their relationships with the land, themselves, and their communities.
Caring for working-class women of color requires pastoral caregiving to be informed and conscious of images of care that are life-giving and informed by epistemologies of the global south. I am using transnational feminism, mutual critical correlation, and ethnography to do three things: First, to describe the conditions of working-class indigenous women in Yucatán, México. Second, to create a trialogue among women’s experience, Christian theology (specifically, eschatology/anthro-gynopology), and public policy (namely, free-trade agreements). And third, to learn how caring practices can attend to particular dimensions of women’s identity and be infused with a responsible eschatological vision.
Pueblo Mágico
Methodology
My research begins in a small village of 456 inhabitants located eight miles from a larger town in Yucatán, México. “Pueblo Mágico” is the pseudonym women gave their hometown. The one paved road that runs through the center of Pueblo Mágico is in desperate need of repair. For the last two years, the people have implored the city to fix this road because campesinxs need a well-paved road by which to transport their chiles to the markets in the nearby town in the beds of their pickup trucks. I understood the struggle of Pueblo Mágico when I initially could not find a taxi cab willing to take me the five miles from the nearby town to the pueblo. Cab drivers told me they did not want to damage their tires and besides, they explained, there was nothing to see in Pueblo Mágico.
Once I finally arrived and a family took me in to live in their home, I was asked, “¿Cómo es que nos encontraste? ¡Si nosotros no estamos ni en el mapa!” (How is it that you found us? We don’t even appear on the map!) That seemed like a curious question since a Google search did yield the location of their pueblo. But that was beside the point. What their question revealed to me was their experience of being invisible and the perceived dispensability of their lives.
My feminist commitments and Gayatri Spivak’s question, “Can the subaltern speak?”1 guide my choices regarding methodology and the presentation of the findings. I resist translating women’s voices because we know that every act of translation is interpretation. I invite the reader to center women’s voices by including their words in the main text and my English translation in the footnotes. I aim to offer the reader the experience of paying attention to privilege, our distances from these voices, and the importance of sitting with not knowing while straining to understand.
I also want us to be mindful that this research uses two languages of the Maya women’s oppressors, Spanish and English. In Pueblo Mágico, the indigenous language is alive and I am not conversant in that language. The women and I rely on our Spanish to build a bridge between the Western academy and Pueblo Mágico. I am weaving a conversation between unlikely conversation partners — unlikely due to the realities of racism, misogyny, and classism. I do not pretend to suggest that what follows in this presentation or the book fully accomplishes the goal of allowing the subaltern to speak. However, I asked many questions as I lived in the pueblo for three months. I paid attention to what I was seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, and smelling. I learned about neoliberalism’s effects on women of color and how to offer care informed by the strategies created by the women themselves, and these insights contribute to practical and pastoral theologies interested in revising praxis.
I focus on practicing solidarity with the living-dead by describing Sofia’s story, one of eleven women’s stories. Using the theological loci of theological anthro/gynopology and eschatology, Sofia’s experience underscores the significance for caregiving that spiritual caregivers and pastoral theologians can glean.
Pueblo Mágico
Sofia
Eighteen-year-old Sofia lives in Pueblo Mágico with her parents and younger sister. Down the road, her elder sister lives with her husband and two sons. Her father is a campesino who knows unjust treatment and the death of his milpa (corn field) that has now relegated him to working as a clerk in a mini-mart in town owned by a larger grocery company but operated by him in the Pueblo Mágico. Her mother preserves the ancestral art of weaving that was once a part of the cultural practice of trading goods for the sake of the community, known as maquilas in México, before the colonial invasions of Spaniards and multinational corporations.
In the wake of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, México, and the US, capitalist owners located a textile maquila in a nearby town where campesinos from the Pueblo Mágico and their families had long safeguarded and perpetuated a strong cosmic connection to the land. Sofia has no memory of her pueblo before the multinational corporation established itself in the area.
From Milpa to Maquila: The Wajikol
However, her parents and elders in the community recall a time when campesinos practiced the Wajikol, an agricultural ritual that preserves the Maya belief in equilibrium and interrelationship between humans, nature, and the gods. The ceremony is a communal ritual that asks the ancestors for their blessing of the land. It is an act of gratitude for the harvest and also a petition for continued prosperity of the crops.
The struggle for life in Pueblo Mágico stretches back through colonial history, which includes their milpas being compromised by genetically modified seeds and free-trade agreements that make growing and selling their crops difficult.
From Mamá to Machine
Maquilas subjugate women by:
Assigning Individuals Traits of Machines
Incarcerating Women
Designing a Culture of Surveillance to Produce Pressure and “cansar” (tire)
Paying Women Lethal Wages
Advancing the Religion of the Colonizer
Consequently, the campesino cannot compete with the global market economy. As the price of fertilizer and costs of land maintenance rise, campesinos are ripped from their land and essentially thrown into the maquila assembly line to produce goods for the consumption of North American customers. They now sow a harvest they reap for the nourishment of the global market economy’s greed, not for their own limited needs. More importantly, their identity-near experience on the assembly line threatens their identity as Lxs Hijxs de Máiz.
Empiezan las Historias, Title page of oldest known Popol Vuh manuscript. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Lxs Hijxs de Maíz
Maya Creation Narrative
The Maya creation myth presents as complementary twin life forces throughout the universe. The balance of life and death, illness and health, is always in flux, and cycles of one to the other make up the rhythms embedded in our ecosystem’s constant motion. This sacred connection and movement between forces of life and death is an inheritance that connects previous generations and life forms to the present. The soul of the people is a collective memory that nurtures women’s bodies and souls. One woman explains the significance of this interconnectedness by stating, “Maize is sacred to us because it connects us with our ancestors. It feeds our spirit as well as our bodies.”2 Consequently, maíz is planted in the milpa and also consumed at every meal. In some way or another, maíz permeates the waking and sleeping of the people. Maíz facilitates both community and the experience of solidarity birthed at the table and distributed to tables around the world.
The Popol Vuh narrates the story of beings, which links humans to maíz and equips them to practice “corazonando la vida” (knowledge gained by feeling-thinking through life). Ecuadorian anthropologist Patricio Guerrero Arias explains that the first humans who were created by the gods were created from mud had words to speak, but no understanding of their own speech. This displeased the gods/goddesses, and they destroyed the humans with water.
The gods’/goddesses’ second attempt to create humans was from wood. The wooden humans were sturdier than the mud humans but the gods/goddesses noticed they had no breath, heart, or blood in their veins. These humans had words to speak but lacked knowledge because they had no memory or humility with which to discover wisdom. The gods/goddesses realized they had failed once again, for “the wooden men were too cold and without feelings, therefore they could not give birth to their creation.”3
Finally, the gods/goddesses met and consulted about what to do. This time they breathed and from their breath created humans.
Sculpture of Mexic Goddess Chicomecoatl with Ears of Corn, Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City, Mexico, 2014. Photo: Adam Jones
They nourished these humans with maíz and the maíz created in humans “the vital fluid that made their heart sing, ignited the fire of the magic of dreams and marvel at the sacred miracle of existence.”4 The breath of the gods/goddesses and the psychospiritual-relational practice of feeding and eating maíz from the earth resulted in the animation of humans.
As Arias explains, Lxs hijxs de maíz see “magical dreams” that are revealed in creation through wisdoms of the heart. What I heard from women in Pueblo Mágico was that their work in the maquila emits an eschatological fragrance of a world they are creating in which they can flourish. This world that is emerging is one in which their dreams can take root and their community can reap from the harvest their lives produce. The creation of this world is constructed by what Arias calls “sabidurías insurgentes” (insurrectionist wisdoms) grounded in la ciencia de la lucha (the science of the struggle), a phrase I am adopting from Zapatista women.
La ciencia de la lucha is knowledge of the material world gained by experience, observation, narration, and experimentation. Zapatista women explain the “science” of the struggle by stating that there is a difference between the science that answers the question por qué (why) and science that answers the question para qué (for what purpose).5 La ciencia de la lucha is interested in the latter.
Muñecas elaboradas en comunidades autónomas zapatistas en la venta en el segundo festival de cine “Puy Ta Cuxlejaltic,” 2019. [Dolls made in autonomous Zapatista communities on sale at the second “Puy Ta Cuxlejaltic” film festival, Mexico, 2019.] Photo: Xolotl
Sueños
On her second day of work, Sofia tells me an assembly line worker leans toward her and says, “¿Sueñas, me dices?” 6 A few days prior, she had been devastated to learn that her application to work in the maquila had been accepted. She had applied for the same reason most of the children of campesinos do—because any work is better than no work—but this news came to her when she was pursuing a sueño and she was crushed. She never wanted to work on the assembly line of the maquila pegando bolsas de frente (sewing pockets onto fabric), but nevertheless here she was.
Sofia’s dream had seemed possible after finishing her bachiller (high school). At that point, it seemed she would avoid the working conditions of the maquila. She had moved in with a physician’s family in a larger town to care for their infant son. While living at their home, the physician tutored Sofia in biology to help her fulfill her dream of working in the medical field. This family had offered to support Sofia in her pursuit of such a career, and Sofia had told me she had wanted to accept this support because she so desperately feels a desire to work in a helping profession. The news about her “successful” application to the maquila had thwarted those dreams. Her father had called her to come home, insisting she could not turn down a job. Moreover, he was not supportive of investing money in the education of a daughter. He believed Sofia would get pregnant and the expense of education would be a waste. He also insisted Sofia take the maquila job because this was her chance to earn a steady income.
Intersectionality theory assists pastoral theologians in understanding the complexity of this suffering. Sofia is economically poor, a woman of color, living in a rural area of a country that is increasingly sinking deeper into debt and subject to bilateral and multilateral agreements in a globalized economy. These macro systems account for her particular experience as the daughter of a campesino suffering from the loss of a once-rural economy. Without her father’s support to accept the help of the physician’s family, she came home and reported to work on the assembly line of the maquila. Understandably, Sofia was crushed and tearful as she told me this story.
By “Sueños” (dreams), the women refer to waking desires communicated to me by their retelling of stories. Sofia is not reflecting on some obscure night vision she experienced in her subconscious that requires the assistance of a trained psychoanalyst to decipher its symbolic meaning, as Sigmund Freud suggested (1856–1939). 7 Nor is she hinting at some struggle to integrate the longings of her unconscious mind with those of her conscious mind, a task psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875–1961) identified as the process of individuation in his theory of dreams. 8 Instead, she is speaking of a struggle she engages in during the waking hours of her day, a sueño that informs her lucha. This sueño is the intended goal (telos) of her work in the maquila. This telos is a relational telos; it is conceived in a community that practices solidarity and sends her adelante (to forge ahead) to engage in the struggle for the sake of her familia and her pueblo.
Many women in the maquila recall coming in to work on those first few days with their sueños still alive. For many of the women in the maquila, they quickly learn that once you begin to work on the assembly line your sueños die along with your humanity. A fellow worker tells Sofia, “Ya estas acá. Y ya después, ni te va, ni te va esto, ni esto. Ya lo vas a olvidar. Ni lo vas a lograr,” Sofia pauses as she takes a deep breath and tells me, sometimes she feels despair, “Ah, no puedes.” But then she says, “Y yo sigo con la mentalidad que ¡Sí se puede!” 9 As Sofia speaks, I hear what I interpret as a tough resolve to seguir adelante (keep forging ahead) despite the voice of her colonial oppressors that have convinced some assembly line workers that to soñar (to dream) is useless. Such discouragements are the palos (beatings) to which the Mexican-Cuban-Lebanese poet Fayad Jamís (1930–1988) refers when he writes, “con tantos palos que te dio la vida/ y aún sigues dándole a la vida sueños.” 10 The palos of colonialism’s subjugation is retained through neoliberal capitalism’s expansion around the globe.
Brown Wooden Logs on Green Grass Field near Lake during Daytime, Lagunas de Montebello National Park, San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chis., Mexico, 2020. Photo: Juan Pablo Flores Padilla
Con Tantos Palos Que Te Dio La Vida
Con tantos palos que te dio la vida
y aún sigues dándole a la vida sueños.
Eres un loco que jamás se cansa
de abrir ventanas y sembrar luceros.
Con tantos palos que te dio la noche
tanta crueldad y frío y tanto miedo
eres un loco de mirada triste
que sólo sabe amar con todo el pecho.
Construir papalotes y poemas
y otras patrañas que se lleva el viento.
Eres un loco de mirada triste
que siente cómo nace un mundo nuevo.
Con tantos palos que te dio la vida
y aún no te cansas de decir: te quiero.
— Fayad Jamis
As campesinxs are plucked from their milpas and distracted from cosiendo (sewing) hipiles while they tend to their children, their way of life and their sueños appear to be unattainable and are difficult to claim because the maquila usurps the Pueblo Mágico’s land and customs. It is difficult to soñar when your native sacred soil is being desecrated. The golpes (blows) caused by a relentless system driven by greed are abusive, but Sofia and the women practice corazonando la vida. They nurture the ability to anticipate danger and intuit how to move in the world. They affirm Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of la facultad, which is the ability of the marginalized/oppressed to quickly sense the underlying structure of phenomena.11 This sense guides risk-taking action.
Catedral, Pueblo Mágico. Photo: Marlene M. Ferreras
Eschatological Practices
•Hablando (Speaking)
•Ignorando (Ignoring)
•Insistiendo (Insisting)
•Renunciando (Giving up responsibility/Quitting)
Eschatological Practices
Sofia’s sueño is a tenacious desire for life that is operationalized through eschatological practices. These practices open up possibilities of conservation, survival, and human flourishing by negotiating the configuration of present circumstances.
When Sofia speaks of “sacrificio” she says, “Si, es cierto, la vida consta de sacrificios. Pero también tiene recompensa.” I wonder how or whether this “sacrifice” of which she speaks and the “recompensa” (reward) relates to the discussion of capitalist economy as religion by the Roman Catholic lay theologian Jung Mo Sung.
Sung argues that there is a difference between a “sacrifice” and the “gift of oneself.” He carefully defines this nuance by explaining that “Sacrifices are external impositions..[that] go against the freedom” of an individual “in exchange for the promise of paradise or for a reward.” On the other hand, the “gift of oneself is born inside the person…[it] is the fruit of love and freedom...[that] goes in the direction of either the beloved one or the one who nurtures solidarity.” 12 Sofia is not speaking of “sacrifice.” She has no desire to vow any kind of loyalty to the maquila, nor does she have any vision of a reward materializing because of her work in the maquila. She is expressing her freedom and agency to give the “gift of oneself.” She tells me she has a plan to earn one year of wages and then use this small amount of money to support her plan to go to school. She says, “Ya estoy aquí. Y pues voy hacer todo lo posible para permanecer. Y mi propósito es trabajar todo un año y luego contar mi dinero … con ese poquito puedo dar mucho de mí.” 13 When Sofia says “dar mucho de mi” (give a lot of me), she is giving the “gift of oneself” to her family and community. There is a growing solidarity among the women in Sofia’s family and they practice hope (hablando, ignorando, insistiendo, renunciando), which often means giving of oneself, as a gift, “para que todos estemos bien.” 14
A year after interviewing Sofia, I returned to the pueblo on the week she resigned from the maquila. I witnessed the reorganizing and re-visioning of Sofia’s father’s beliefs about women and education. I want to underscore the significance of his shift in beliefs and values influenced by his witnessing Sofia’s daily unjust dying in the maquila. As a campesino, he knows unjust treatment and the death of his milpa. He tends to life when his daughter tells him she is renunciando, and he says to her, “Si tanto quieres ese sueño, ve y lucha por esa meta, no dejes que nadie te diga que no puedes.” 15
Lxs Hijxs de Maíz
Lxs Hijxs de Maíz, (2018) by Marlene M. Ferreras, pencil, Redlands, Ca.
Lxs Hijxs De Maíz As Revised Praxis
The pastoral caregiver, informed by the working-class Maya mexicanas in this study, knows that she/he is more like a campesinx than an agent of hope. They forego their expert status and cultivate the relationship with the people and their sueños. The pastoral counselor can become more campesinx-aware in the caretaking relationship. Campesinxs work on the milpa and they do their work under challenging conditions. They struggle with their milpas being compromised by genetically modified seeds and trade agreements that make growing and selling their crops more difficult. They recognize their dependence on the unpredictability of the climate. Crops grow not solely because of what the campesinx does, but because of the relationship the campesinx builds with the milpa. There is a spiritual dimension that flows through planetary life and the campesinx is like a caregiver who, through decolonial approaches to pastoral care, learns how life continues to grow despite challenges present in the ecosystem.
The well-being of any one part relies on the health of each element. In my book, I present the image of Lxs Hijxs de Máiz as an image for pastoral care and I explain how to use this image in pastoral caregiving, with some helpful questions and conversations that attend to the elements labeled in the image.
Footnotes
1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988), 271–313.
2. Juana Batz Puac, “Creation Story of the Maya,” Living Maya Time, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, accessed March 15, 2018, https://maya.nmai.si.edu/the-maya/creation-story-maya.
3. Patricio Guerrero Arias, Corazonar una antropología comprometida con la vida: Miradas otras desde Abya-Yala la decolonización del poder, del saber y del ser (Quito, Ecuador: Universidad Politécnic Salesiana, 2010), 105.
4. Patricio Guerrero Arias, Corazonar una antropología comprometida con la vida: Miradas otras desde Abya-Yala la decolonización del poder, del saber y del ser (Quito, Ecuador: Universidad Politécnic Salesiana, 2010), 105.
5. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism aEugenia Gutiérrez, “El Zapatismo, la ciencia consciente y la función del arco iris,” Radio Zapatista, January 4, 2017, https://radiozapatista.org/?p=20150&lang=en.
6. You say you dream?
7. A. A. Brill, trans., The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (New York: Modern Library, 1938).
8. Carl G. Jung, The Essential Jung, ed. Anthony Storr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)..
9. “You’re already here. And later, this won’t go well, that won’t go well, not even the other will go well. You’re going to forget your dream. You’re not even going to achieve it,” he said. And me? (pause) Ugh, you can’t. But I hold on to my notions that yes, it can be done.
10. With so many blows/beatings that life gave you. Fayad Jamís, Con tantos palos que te dio la vida y otras canciones, Ediciones Vigía (Matanzas, Cuba: Ed. Vigía, 1987), 2.
11. Anzaldua, Borderlands, 60–61.
12. Sung, Desire, Market and Religion, chap. 1.
13. I’m already here. And I’m going to do everything possible to stay. And my purpose is to work a whole year and then count my money so my father doesn’t come to me to say, “You know I can’t support you.” But I know I have a little bit, and with that little bit I can give a lot of me.
14. So that we can all be well/live well
15. If you want that dream so much, go and fight for that goal; do not let anyone tell you that you can’t.
OP Talks
Dr. Neomi De Anda talks to 2023 HTI Book Prize winner Dr. Marlene M. Ferreras, whose work looks toward a North American indigenized pastoral theology
"A child’s prophetic cry for leche redirects moral conscience in this tender and convicting indigenous pastoral theology. The book proclaims the gospel of working-class Maya mexicanas who resist corporate greed through a vocation of subversive motherhood. Centering the land and relationships,Lxs Hijxs de Maízreject a disengaged church to teach Ferreras a spirituality of presence that undermines neoliberal power. Setting a new standard for critical, theological ethnography, the book positions the researcher as a vulnerable learner and sends readers on a quest to learn: What grows in your pueblo, at what cost? I can’t wait to teach this book!"
Duane R. Bidwell,
Herbert School of Medicine, author of When One Religion Isn’t Enough: The Lives of Spiritually Fluid People
